How far ahead should an automation fire?
Set Days ahead to at least 10, and 14 if the card really has to land on the day. The field defaults to 5, which is shorter than the seven working days a single card needs from creation to doormat — a rule left at 5 will still create cards, and they will arrive after the date.
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#Why seven working days
Scribble works backwards from the date a card should arrive. Every step is a deadline, and the chain for a single card looks like this:
| Step | Working days before arrival | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Posted | 4 | 3 days USPS First Class transit, plus 1 day of buffer |
| Packed and stamped | 5 | 1 day to get a written card into an envelope and into a tray |
| Written | 6 | 1 day of writing lead |
| Card stock prepared | 7 | 1 day for the printed blank to be pulled and staged |
Ask for an exact day rather than a window and the chain gets one working day longer, because exact-day accuracy costs the scheduler its slack. See arrival windows for the full arithmetic.
#Choosing a number
| Days ahead | Effect | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| 5 (the default) | Cards arrive after the date. Do not use. | Never |
| 10 | Usually lands on or a day before the date. | The minimum you should ship with |
| 14 | Comfortably early. A card may arrive up to two or three days before the date. | Birthdays and anniversaries where late is worse than early |
| 21+ | Definitely early, and holds credits earlier. | December, when USPS is least predictable |
#The catch-up window
Catch-up window is how many previous days a run re-checks, and it defaults to 7. It exists because a scheduler can miss a day: a Worker outage, a deploy that eats an invocation, a clock that slips. Without it, everybody whose birthday fell on that day would simply never get a card and nobody would find out.
Re-checking is free and safe. A day that has already been handled collides on the unique (rule, contact, occurrence date) claim and costs one rejected insert rather than one card. Leave it at 7 unless you have a reason not to.
#Common questions
- If I change the lead time, does it affect cards already scheduled?
- No. Cards that have already been created keep their dates. The new lead time applies from the next daily run.
- Will a longer lead time mean the card arrives too early?
- Only slightly. Scribble derives the posting date from the arrival date, not from when the card was created, so a card made three weeks early still posts on schedule. The extra time is production headroom, not extra time in the mail.
- What is the largest lead time I can set?
- There is no hard cap in the product, but very long lead times hold credits earlier and make list changes less responsive: somebody added to the list nine days before their birthday will be missed if the lead time is 14.
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