> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.tied.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Teams and business hours

> Coverage windows and out-of-hours behaviour.

These are two different settings that happen to answer the same underlying question — who is covering this, and when — so it is worth being clear up front that Tied keeps them in different places.

## Teams are about routing, not hours

A team is a name, a set of members, and one switch: whether it auto-assigns. Conversations can be moved onto a team independently of who is on it.

With auto-assign on, a conversation handed to a team round-robins to one of that team's members with open capacity — the same mechanism that assigns a fresh conversation at the inbox level, just scoped to the team's own roster. Turn it off, and conversations sit on the team unassigned to a specific person until someone claims one.

<Info>
  **Moving a conversation to a different team is itself logged.** It shows up in the thread as an
  activity entry, the same way any assignment change does — so reading a conversation back later
  explains itself instead of leaving you to guess why ownership moved.
</Info>

## Business hours live on the inbox, not the team

This is the detail worth catching before you configure it: business hours are a property of the **inbox**, not the team. Each inbox has its own weekly schedule — open and close time for every day, or closed all day, or open all day — evaluated in that inbox's own timezone. A new inbox starts with a sensible default: closed Saturday and Sunday, 9:00 to 17:00 on weekdays, editable day by day from there.

<Warning>
  **The schedule does nothing until you turn it on.** An inbox's weekly hours are a separate setting
  from the master "working hours enabled" switch. A fully configured schedule with that switch off is
  decorative — nothing checks it.
</Warning>

## What happens out of hours

If you have written an out-of-office message for the inbox, Tied doesn't push it out proactively — it sends the message in reply to an incoming customer message while the inbox is closed, at most once per day. It also holds back entirely if an agent sent a public reply in the last five minutes, so a human who just answered isn't immediately followed by an automated one.

These same hours are also what the AI agent checks before it goes quiet for a human it is handing a conversation to — see [AI-to-human handoff](/inbox/handoff). Outside business hours, since there is nobody there yet to hand off to, the AI agent keeps answering rather than leaving the customer stuck until morning.

## Next

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="AI-to-human handoff" icon="user-round-check" href="/inbox/handoff">
    Where these hours decide whether the AI agent goes quiet or keeps going.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Assignment policies" icon="user-round-cog" href="/automation/assignment">
    Round robin, load balancing, and how a team fits into both.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>


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