Assign and schedule - Thread Docs

Reading the board tells you what needs to happen. This lesson is about making it happen: getting the right thread onto the right tech, scheduled for the right time, without letting an XLA slip. Thread gives you three levers (availability, auto-dispatch, and Planner), plus a live XLA stepper on every ticket so you always know what’s tightening.

Availability, who can take work right now

Before Thread pushes any work automatically, it needs to know who’s actually at their desk. Each member sets their own status from the account menu in Inbox:

Available: a green dot on their avatar; auto-dispatch can push new threads to them.
Offline: a grey dot; auto-dispatch skips them.

As a dispatcher, treat that green dot as your capacity signal — it’s the roster you’re balancing against. Availability persists across sessions and devices, and it only affects push auto-dispatch; techs can still pull the next thread manually regardless. See Set your availability for auto-dispatch.

You don’t have to chase people down in DMs to flip their switch — open a team’s Team Home page and toggle availability directly from the Members table. It’s the same server-side state as each tech’s account-menu switch, so both surfaces stay in sync. Team Home also shows each tech’s live active-thread count against the profile’s Max threads limit, so you can see who Auto-assign will actually pick next.

The Available for dispatch toggle only appears when your workspace has push auto-dispatch enabled. On pull-only workspaces, techs use a “Get next thread” button instead, and there’s no availability switch to watch.

Auto-dispatch profiles — let Thread do the routine routing

Auto-dispatch profiles decide how eligible tickets reach techs. Each profile targets one or more boards and runs in one of two modes:

Mode	How it assigns	Best for
Next thread	Threads wait in your dispatch statuses; a tech requests the next one, and Thread scoring decides which comes up.	Desks that already run a “grab the next ticket” workflow.
Auto-assign	Thread pushes eligible threads to available techs automatically, based on their active workload.	Desks that want tickets on a tech’s plate the moment they have capacity.

Next thread ranks the queue with eight Thread scoring factors you weight (Not used → Highest): priority, ticket age, client-replied, sentiment, company type, contact type, agreement type, and source. Auto-assign instead caps each tech at a max active threads count (up to 80), measures load against the active statuses you pick per board, and (when no tech is eligible) either retries every minute or applies a fallback status change, whichever you choose. Both modes have a Test run panel so you can preview the order before you save.

Availability of Auto-assign: Next thread (pull) is available to everyone; Auto-assign (push) is rolling out — it shows a “Coming soon” tag until it’s enabled for your workspace.

Auto-assign can override any Flow that assigns tickets to specific members: Thread shows a banner when you enter Auto-assign mode. Review and scope those member-assigning Flows before you turn Auto-assign on in production, or two systems will fight over the same tickets.

Configuring profiles is an admin job, but you’re the one who lives with the result, so feed back what you see. If the scoring surfaces the wrong ticket next, or a max-threads cap is starving a fast tech, that’s tuning you should flag.

Planner, schedule the day by dragging

For work that needs to live on a calendar, Planner is where you dispatch by hand. Every member gets an hour-by-hour calendar, and every ticket is in one of three places:

Triage: the panel at the bottom, listing tickets nobody owns yet. This is your dispatch pile. Work it down by finding each ticket an owner.
Todo: the row under each member’s calendar. Tickets they own that don’t have a time yet.
Calendar: tickets planned for a time slot, synced to the PSA as schedule entries.

Use the views under Planner in the left navigation to switch between All members, My schedule, and one of your teams. Hover a member’s name to see whether they’re available for dispatch. Dispatching is drag-and-drop:

Assign by dragging out of Triage

Drag a ticket from Triage onto a member’s Todo. They become the owner, with no time set yet.

Schedule by dropping on a time or a day

Drag it from Todo (or straight from Triage) onto a half-hour slot to create a 30-minute plan, or onto a day in Week view to plan it for that day without a time. Click Set a time on a card for an exact start and end, in 15-minute steps.

Reschedule, reassign, or unplan by dragging again

Drag a block to another time or member; it keeps its length. Moving the owner’s block to someone else reassigns the ticket, while moving a secondary resource’s block only moves their plan. Dragging a block to Todo removes its plan, and dragging anything to Triage removes the plan and the owner. Planner asks you to confirm, and every change has Undo.

Planner syncs to your PSA automatically, so a scheduled ticket shows up on the tech’s PSA calendar too. Your changes reach the PSA in real time; inbound, ConnectWise is real-time, while Autotask and HaloPSA refresh on a ~5-minute poll. Conflicts differ by PSA: ConnectWise lets you double-book (overlapping plans sit side by side on the board); Autotask and HaloPSA reject overlaps. If you use TimeZest, you can book a customer-facing appointment straight from the composer with /timezest.

XLA timers, never get surprised by a breach

Every ticket with an XLA carries a live stepper in Inbox, and reading it is core dispatcher hygiene. Each ticket can run two timers:

Response timer: counts down to the first-reply deadline (and stops the moment a member sends that first reply).
Resolution timer: counts down to the resolution deadline, scoped per board.

The stepper shows real remaining time, advances as the ticket moves through its lifecycle, and marks a ticket breached if it resolves after its deadline had already passed. Hover it to see which XLA profile is driving the deadline.

Timers pause automatically while the Triage Agent is engaged, and due dates respect your holidays and custom closures, so a thread in an AI-handled conversation, or one sitting over a closure, won’t silently breach. When a paused timer resumes, it re-anchors to a correct deadline rather than inheriting a stale one. Sort your triage View so the tightest steppers float to the top and dispatch those first.

You can route, schedule, and protect XLAs by hand. Now let AI carry the routine so you focus on the judgment calls.

AI for dispatch

Tune the Triage Agent, drive triage with Super Magic, and report on the board.