Owner controls, background jobs, and the finder tools under Settings > System

What you will have

• Find the owner-only Owner Name, Owner Email and System Email fields, and see why they are locked to the owner.
• Read Data Retention to see exactly how many days each kind of log, event and chat is kept before it purges.
• Read Integration Sync's device activity window, warranty lookup budgets and renewal warnings, and see that PSA Write-Back is permanently off.
• See how often the platform's own background jobs actually run, on Scheduled Jobs.
• Watch a job you started, like writing a year of security awareness training, on Background Tasks, and see everyone else's too.
• Find where to add or edit the help text that shows in a page's own question-mark drawer, on Admin Tools.
• Read System Version to see the running build, and confirm Automatic Updates is off.
• Search every setting on the platform by name from All Settings, and jump straight to it.
• Use the Integrations and System Logs doorway pages to find those two areas from inside Settings.

Why it works this way

Steps

1. 1

   Open Settings > System > Owner Controls.

   Owner Name and Owner Email are both tagged (owner only): only the tenant's own owner account, or an internal Super Admin, can save changes to them, even though any admin with Settings access can view the page. Owner Email is the account that auto-promotes to Super Admin on first sign-in, so treat it like a domain-transfer credential. System Email is the sender and owner address for records the system creates on its own, such as users and tickets that arrive from integration syncs.

   

2. 2

   Open Data Retention to see how long each kind of record is kept.

   Every field here is set automatically and view only. Info logs keep 1 day, warn logs 2 days, error logs 30 days, the processed event ledger 30 days, rule-engine decision rows 90 days, the outbound email log 180 days, read notifications 90 days, and unread notifications 180 days - longer than the read window, so an alert nobody has seen yet survives. Archived Elise chats default to 0, which means keep forever; active chats are never purged either way. Error logs, the event ledger, unprocessed events and emails still in flight are held longer, or never purged, because the AI diagnostic engine and support both rely on them to explain what happened later.

   

3. 3

   Open Integration Sync and scroll to the Cadence card at the bottom.

   The fields on this page - Device Activity Window, Device Aging Threshold, the per-vendor warranty lookup budgets, Days Before License Renewal and MS Renewal Warning Days - are windows and lookaheads, how far back or ahead each sync looks. PSA Write-Back on this same page shows Off and View only: it is permanently retired, always off, and can no longer be turned on. The card at the bottom says the tick interval itself lives on Scheduled Jobs (clients sync every 6 hours, tickets every 1 minute); adjust cadence there, and the windows here to tune false-positive churn.

   

4. 4

   Open Scheduled Jobs to see every cron job's own cadence.

   Each row names the job, what it does, its plain-English cadence badge such as Every 5 minutes or Daily at 4:00 AM, a Run Now button rate-limited to once a minute, and an On/Off toggle that pauses the job entirely. Hovering a cadence badge shows the exact crontab expression behind it. The page's own intro says cadences are tuned in code for vendor API quotas and cost, and that the editor list and the real job runner can drift - some jobs run on hardcoded defaults with no editor row, and some editor rows point at jobs the runner does not register - so treat the list as a guide, not a guarantee.

   

5. 5

   Open Background Tasks to see what you and your team have started.

   This ledger is the opposite of Scheduled Jobs: nothing on it runs on its own and there is nothing here to configure, only jobs a person clicked to start that keep running after the page returns - the real example on this tenant is 'Write annual security awareness training,' shown here Finished for 2026 Security Awareness Training. Each row shows the task, what it was for, who started it, its status, when it started and finished, and a Result column. The card opens on your own tasks, because that is usually what brought you here.

   Note: Read the Result column first if a task fails - it is empty here because nothing has failed, but on a real failure it carries the actual reason plus an incident number when one exists, not a generic apology. Some failures are worth retrying and some will fail identically every time; nothing is ever half-saved, since a failed job leaves what it was working on exactly as it found it.

   

6. 6

   Click Show everyone's to widen the list past your own tasks.

   The card's title changes to Everyone's background tasks and the button flips to Show only mine. This is the view for working out why a colleague's training or report never appeared. Seeing everyone's tasks is its own permission, separate from ordinary Settings access, so being able to change a setting does not by itself let someone read what the whole team has been running.

   

7. 7

   Open Admin Tools and scroll to Help Entries.

   Above Help Entries, the same page also holds the Admin Navigation Tree (drag rows to reorder the sidebar; order saves instantly, and field edits save from the editor panel on the right). Help Entries itself lists every HelpEntry with its Question, the exact Page navPath it is pinned to, whether it is Active, and its sort order, with a search box and a New Entry button. Each entry's navPath has to match a page's help path exactly - it never rolls down from a page to that page's own sub-pages - so covering several pages with one topic takes a separate entry per navPath.

   

8. 8

   Scroll down to System Version.

   This card shows the running Docker image's short commit id as Current Version, its Build Date, and a Release Channel field - normally a channel name like Canary, Dev or Stable, though this demo tenant is deliberately pinned to one build so its Release Channel shows that build's id instead. An Up to Date row confirms the instance is Current, and Automatic Updates sits below it, off. Updates do not happen from this page: deployment is handled by the platform's own image pipeline, and this toggle is inert legacy UI.

   

9. 9

   Open All Settings and expand a category.

   The search box searches every registered setting across the platform, and the line beside it counts what the search is showing against the whole set, 191 of 191 here with nothing typed. Below it, a chip per category (Billing, Clients, Email, General, Integrations, rmm, Security, SLA, Tickets) filters the list to that category; the chips carry no counts of their own. Expanding a category, Email here, lists each setting's name, a plain description of what it does, its current value, and an Edit link that jumps straight to the page that edits it. There is no automated check that a relocated setting's Edit link still points at the right field, so if a setting moves without this entry being updated, the link can land on a page that no longer edits it.

   

10. 10

    Open Integrations to see why it lives outside Settings.

    This doorway page explains that connections to outside systems - PSA, RMM, identity, accounting - act like their own marketplace of vendor tiles with live connection state, so they live in the Integrations area instead of a Settings page. Its four steps: open Integrations, pick the provider you want (QuickBooks, Microsoft, your RMM), enter or authorize its credentials, then enable the connection and confirm it shows as connected. The Open Integrations button jumps straight there.

    

11. 11

    Open System Logs to see why it also lives outside Settings.

    This doorway explains that logs are an operational record you read and filter, not a setting you configure, so each stream is kept separate in its own Logs area. The card's own five steps are: open Logs, choose a stream, read that the assistant's own action log is not one of them, filter by date, user or source, then open an entry to see its full detail. The stream list named on this card is Audit, Email, System, Operations or Sessions. The assistant's action log lives under its own Action History tab instead.

    

12. 12

    You do not have to stay on Background Tasks while something runs.

    Once a task is listed it is running on the server, not in your browser, so closing the tab, going to lunch, or signing in from another machine makes no difference. The page polls for updates every 5 seconds only while at least one of your tasks is still running, and stops polling once everything is finished, so a completed ledger costs nothing to leave open. The only thing that can interrupt a task is the portal itself restarting mid-run; a task caught by that is marked failed with a note saying so, rather than sitting on Running forever.

If it did not work

• If Owner Name or Owner Email will not save, that is by design - only the owner account itself or a Super Admin can change them.
• If Integration Sync's PSA Write-Back looks stuck on Off with no way to enable it, that is not a bug - write-back was permanently retired and the field is now view only.
• If a task you know a colleague started never appears on Background Tasks, you are looking at My background tasks - click Show everyone's.

Questions this page answers