Overview
Business Journeys answers one question: can your customers still do the things your business depends on?
Your test suite checks that the code is correct. This checks that the live system is actually working — that someone can find your page, send you an enquiry, book a time, sign in, and pay you. Those are the things you cannot afford to lose quietly.
The check runs by itself on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6am. If something breaks, it appears in your “Needs you” inbox with what broke and what it costs you.
Find it at Operations → Business Journeys.
What gets checked
Only the journeys your business actually has switched on. If you do not take bookings, there is no booking check — it shows as “Not set up” rather than as a problem.
| Journey | What it protects |
|---|---|
| Customers can find your business online | Every link you have ever shared |
| New customers can send you an enquiry | Work you would otherwise lose without knowing |
| Customers can book a time with you | Reservations, and protection against double-booking |
| Existing customers can sign in to their account | Customers self-serving instead of phoning you |
| Customers can pay you online | Completing a sale |
How much each check proves
This is the important part, and the page always tells you.
A check can prove different amounts, and more is more expensive. Each journey shows what was checked and what was not:
- the page opens — the door opens
- the setup is complete — the room behind the door is furnished
- a real record can be saved — a genuine booking or enquiry record can be written, and the rules that stop double-bookings still work
- a customer doing this in a browser — not currently checked
A journey is only reported at the level actually reached. If only the page load was checked, the page says so and does not tell you the journey is fine. This is deliberate: a check that overstates what it knows is worse than no check, because you would stop looking.
When a check cannot run at all
Sometimes a check cannot even start. The most common reason is that your install has no public web address set yet, so there is no customer-facing page to open.
That is shown as Could not check, and it is deliberately not shown as a failure. It is a statement about the check, not about your business. Nothing was tested, so nothing is known — your booking page is not being called broken, because it was never opened.
You get one item for each cause, not one for each journey. If a single missing setting blocks four checks, that is one thing to fix, so it arrives as one item that names the checks it blocked. It is raised as a warning rather than an error, because a setting you have not filled in yet is not an outage.
The page headline says how many checks could not run, and the check clears itself once the setting is in place.
Nothing you see is a real record
Some checks need to create a real booking or enquiry to prove the path works. They do it inside a rehearsal that is undone immediately — nothing is kept, and nothing appears in your reservations or your enquiry list. The made-up customer details use an address that cannot exist, so nothing can ever be sent to a real person.
When something breaks
- It appears in Needs you with the outcome you lost in plain language, plus what failed.
- The link takes you to that specific journey — not to a list you have to search.
- Open Show technical details for the step-by-step result, including what was expected and what actually happened.
The platform does not fix it for you. It will not quietly change your system and tell you afterwards. Raising a fix is your decision, and it goes through the normal governed process like any other change.
Once the journey works again, the next check clears the alert on its own — there is nothing to tick off.
Related
- Operations — the delivery backlog
- Self-upgrade — how platform updates are applied