← Support

Choosing alert recipients

Each organisation can send alerts to up to five email addresses. You can add and remove recipients at any time from that organisation's alert settings page.

You start as the only recipient

When you connect an organisation, your own email address is set as its alert recipient automatically, so monitoring works from the first scan. That's a starting point, not a recommendation — for most businesses it's the wrong list to leave alone, for the reason immediately below. Reconnecting an organisation later never changes a list you've already edited.

If an organisation has no recipients at all, a warning appears at the top of your dashboard and that organisation's page. Changes are still detected and recorded while that's true, and they'll be sent once you nominate someone — but until then, nobody is told.

Send alerts to someone other than the person making changes

An alert exists to catch a mistake or a compromised Xero account. If the only person who'd ever see the alert is the same person who edited the bank detail in the first place, it adds no protection. A compromised login, or a dishonest edit, could go unnoticed indefinitely, because the one person who'd notice is the one who made it.

Send alerts to whoever actually authorises payments, or to a manager or owner who isn't the one editing supplier records day to day. In a small business this is often the owner; in a bookkeeping practice it's usually whoever supervises the file, not the bookkeeper doing the data entry.

Recipients don't need a LedgerWatch account

Alerts go to a plain email address. The recipient doesn't need to log in to read one or act on it. Every alert email says plainly what changed and what to check. If someone also needs to log in and see the change log or adjust settings, they need their own LedgerWatch account, connected to the same organisation separately.

Changing the list

Adding or removing a recipient takes effect immediately, and sends that address a short confirmation email so they know they've been added or removed, so nothing changes silently.