Auto mode

What it does

Every table is either in auto mode or manual. The switch is the row trigger in the table’s Review settings, and the toolbar shows which one the table is in.

In auto mode, every document dropped into the workspace becomes a row and is extracted against the table’s current columns. That is what you want when documents arrive continuously and the table is meant to stay current — an intake pipeline, a monitored folder, an ongoing matter.

Tables created in the app start in auto mode. Manual is the right choice while you are still authoring columns, because it means nothing is spent until the questions are the ones you meant to ask.

What it costs

Every automatic run spends credits at the usual rates, against the organisation’s balance, without anyone present to approve it. A quiet week costs nothing. A colleague bulk-uploading two hundred documents into a workspace with three auto-mode tables costs quite a lot.

There is nothing wrong with that — it is the feature working — but it is worth setting the two controls first:

• A monthly spend cap. Stops runs once a set number of credits has been used in a calendar month, and is enforced at every debit, so topping up does not lift it. That is the point of it.
• A low-balance alert. An email when the balance dips below a level you choose, which arrives once per dip and re-arms when the balance recovers.

Both are off until you set them, and both live on the billing page. Setting a cap before turning auto mode on across an organisation is the sensible order. See how credits work.

Turning it off

It is a table setting, reversible at any time, and switching to manual does not touch answers already extracted. Changing it needs Manage on the workspace — it is a spending decision as much as a behavioural one, which is why it sits with the settings rather than with the column tools. See sharing a workspace.

What it does not do

Auto mode reacts to documents arriving. It does not rerun existing rows, refresh answers on a schedule, or notice that a column’s prompt has changed — a prompt edit marks the old answers stale and waits for you, in an auto-mode table exactly as in a manual one.