Text messages

RowFold can text people — notifications worth interrupting somebody for, booking confirmations and reminders, and a Send SMS step in any automation — with the consent and quiet-hours rules that come with sending on a shared number. When RowFold texts you Text is the one channel here that can wake somebody up, so it's deliberately not everything you allowed by email. Only the kinds worth interrupting someone for go by text — being assigned something does; a record you watch changing doesn't. It's off until you turn it on, and having a phone number on file is not taken as agreement: a number is contact detail, consent is a separate switch in your own settings. Quiet hours By default RowFold sends no texts between 9pm and 8am in the recipient's own local time, and this is on unless it's turned off. The sender is usually a background job at whatever hour it happened to run, rather than a person who'd have thought twice — so the window is enforced centrally. A text that would land inside it waits and goes out when quiet hours end. It's checked again at that point, so if the person replied STOP overnight, it doesn't go. The SMS log shows it as Waiting, with the time it will send. Three kinds of text are handled differently. A booking text whose appointment starts before quiet hours end isn't sent at all, since it could only arrive too late. Booking confirmations, cancellations and moved bookings go straight away, because each one changes where the person needs to be. And a booking reminder that would fall in quiet hours goes out the evening before instead, when there's still time. Texting from an automation Automations have a Send SMS step, so a text can be part of any workflow: a booking confirmed, a job dispatched, an approval waiting. It goes through the same rules as everything else here — opt-outs, quiet hours and the spend ceiling all still apply, and there's no way to route around them. Opting out The first text RowFold sends to a number says how to stop. Later ones don't repeat it, and replying STOP to any of them still works: it stops them immediately, and START resumes them. Opt-outs are held against the number itself, so somebody who stops is stopped everywhere at once rather than having to repeat it. That's deliberate: texts go out on a sender identity shared across RowFold, so one person's opt-out has to mean something globally. What it costs Texts are metered in segments rather than messages. A plain message fits 160 characters in one segment, but a single emoji or curly quote drops that to 70 — so a "short" message can quietly cost three times what it looks like. There's a monthly ceiling, and the log at Settings — SMS log shows what went out, to whom, how many segments it took and whether it was delivered. Tips • Keep messages to plain characters where you can — one emoji more than halves how much text fits in a segment. • Test with your own number first; opt-outs are global, so a colleague who replies STOP stops receiving everything. Good to know • A phone number on a record is not consent — nobody is texted because a number exists. • STOP is honoured immediately and globally. Somebody who opts out stops receiving texts from every workspace, not just the one that sent the last one. Who can do what • The SMS log and the workspace's spend ceiling are admin-only. • Whether you personally get texts is yours to set, and starts switched off.