Account administration

This page is for whoever owns the Tola account — the person who configures it, pays for it, and gets asked why something has stopped working. It covers the settings that are easy to miss and the routine maintenance that keeps an account from slowly degrading.

Account settings

Under Settings → Account you control the things that apply everywhere:

Set the timezone correctly before you look at any report. It is the most common reason a set of numbers looks inexplicably wrong.

Business hours

Configured per channel rather than per account, because different queues are staffed differently.

Two things depend on them: what customers are told outside working hours, and how SLA times are calculated. Set them honestly — hours you can actually staff, not hours you would like to advertise. Understating them costs nothing and protects both your numbers and your reputation.

Remember to update them for public holidays. Nobody ever does, and it shows up as a bad week in the SLA report every year.

Custom attributes

Custom attributes are the structured fields your business runs on. Define them under Settings → Custom attributes, on either contacts or conversations, choosing a type — text, number, date, link, list or checkbox.

Some discipline here pays off substantially:

• Define them before you import data, so there is something to map to.
• Use a list type rather than free text wherever the values are known. Free text produces enterprise, Enterprise and ENT in the same field, and none of your filters work.
• Keep the set small. Fields agents must remember to fill in do not get filled in. Prefer attributes a workflow or your own systems can set automatically.
• Delete what you stopped using. A stale field is worse than a missing one, because people trust it.

Importing data

Bring contacts and companies in from a spreadsheet under Settings → Data import. Map your columns to Tola's fields, and existing records are matched rather than duplicated.

The routine that avoids pain:

1. Normalise phone numbers to full international format first. This is the single biggest source of duplicates and failed matches.
2. Create your custom attributes before importing.
3. Import ten rows and check the result before running the full file.
4. Check for duplicates afterwards, and merge what you find. See contacts and companies.

Exporting data

Contacts and conversations can be exported. You will want this for three reasons, and it is worth knowing how before you need it urgently:

• Subject access and erasure requests under data protection law.
• Reporting beyond what the built-in reports cover, in your own analysis tools.
• Leaving, or moving to a different account structure. Your data is yours.

Billing

Billing is per agent. The practical consequences:

• Remove agents who have left. They cost money and hold access. This is the most common avoidable expense on any support platform.
• Bots and AI assistants are not agents. Automation does not add to the seat count.
• Enterprise features — SAML, advanced assignment, voice, custom roles, SLA — depend on your plan. If something described in these docs is not visible in your account, the plan is the usual reason.

Housekeeping

Accounts degrade quietly. A quarterly half-hour prevents most of it.

Every quarter, check:

1. Agents. Anyone left? Anyone changed role and kept old access?
2. Channel access lists. The setting that drifts fastest.
3. Labels. Delete unused ones. If nobody applies a label, it is not describing anything real.
4. Canned responses. Delete what nobody uses; fix what everyone rewrites before sending.
5. Workflows. Turn off rules that no longer fire or no longer make sense. Dead automation is how a system becomes unexplainable.
6. Custom attributes. Delete fields that are mostly empty.
7. Help center articles. Anything describing a screen that has changed is actively misleading.

Every year: review who your administrators are, and whether your retention practice matches what you tell customers.

When something breaks

The three failures that account for most support tickets about Tola, and what they usually are:

A channel stopped receiving messages. Almost always an expired credential or a revoked authorisation on the provider's side — Meta, Google and Microsoft all expire access periodically. Check the channel's settings page; it will normally say so, and reauthorising fixes it.

A workflow stopped firing. Either it was disabled, or a condition it depends on changed — an attribute renamed, a label deleted, a team removed. Check its conditions against what currently exists.

Conversations are not being assigned. Check that agents are marked available, that they have access to the channel, and that they are not all at their capacity limit. It is usually the third one.

If a problem does not fall into these, check the audit log first. Most unexplained behaviour is a change somebody made and forgot to mention.