Settings
Background jobs: billing runs, bulk emails and big exports
Which big actions run in the background, how to watch, cancel or retry them, and how long downloads are kept.
1. Why some actions run in the background
Some actions take longer than a web page can wait. QWTN runs them in the background, so you can carry on with other work or close the page. A job saves its place as it goes and keeps running after you leave.
2. What runs in the background
Billing runs of more than 1,500 invoices (smaller runs finish while you wait, and billing runs need the Carrier plan or above). Payment reminders you send to selected invoices: on Invoices, select the invoices and choose Send reminders. Signature requests for many transfer notes at once (Solo plan and above, like a single request). Customer portal downloads of more than 150 transfer notes, up to 3,000 PDFs per download. Exports from the Transfer notes, Invoices and Clients lists when there are more than 20,000 rows. Undoing an import of more than 5,000 rows. The automatic daily payment reminders also run as one background job for your account.
3. Watch a job
A box with a progress bar appears at the bottom right of the screen and stays there while you move around QWTN, until you dismiss it. Settings, Background jobs lists recent jobs with their status. Owners and admins see every job in the account. Other staff see the jobs they started. When a job finishes you get a notification under the bell at the top. Tick "We'll email you when it's done" while it is running if you also want an email.
4. Cancel a job
Cancel stops a job at its next saving point. Work already done stays done. For example, invoices a billing run has already created are kept, and running the billing run again carries on with the jobs that are still unbilled.
5. If a job fails or stops
If a job fails, the page shows the reason. QWTN has already retried it up to five times, with a longer wait each time. Choose Retry to carry on from where it stopped. If the server running a job stops part way, the job is picked up again by itself after about ten minutes and carries on from its last saving point, without billing or emailing anything twice.
6. Downloads
Finished exports and ZIP files are available from the job for 14 days, then removed. A list export is a normal CSV, the same as one from a small export. A large ZIP download may arrive as several files of about 40 MB each, and each has its own Download button. Customers using the portal see their own progress on the Documents page and can ask for an email when it is ready.
7. Bulk emails
Bulk reminders and signature requests go out in batches, from your normal sender address, under the same rules as a single email. A reminder is never sent twice for the same invoice and type, even if the job is retried. How fast the emails arrive depends on your email provider's limits.
8. Test figures
In our own testing on a large account, a billing run of 2,151 invoices with 38,240 lines finished in under two minutes, and a duty of care pack of 533 transfer note PDFs was ready in about a minute. These are test results, not promises. Your own times depend on your data.
9. Using the API
The bulk reminder and bulk signature request calls answer at once with a job id. Poll the job for its status and progress, and send "dryRun": true to count what would be sent without sending anything. The Developers page explains how to reach these endpoints.