Assigning a unit to a store

The step that turns a recording device into a monitored one. Until it's done, the unit alerts nobody.

Assigning a unit to a store connects it to everything else: who is alerted, whose territory it falls in, and which store's compliance record it contributes to. If the unit still carries its arrival name ("Unassigned" plus digits), assigning it also renames it to the store — numbered when the store already has sensors — so alerts never lead with a shipping label. A name you've typed yourself is never touched.

Stores with more than one sensor: match by the device ID printed on the unit's label against the hardware ID on the unit's page before acting on it. Names are editable; hardware IDs aren't.

You can do it from the unit's own page — an unassigned unit asks for its store in a banner at the top — or from Stores & locations, where every sensor without a store is gathered at the top of the page with a store dropdown on each row. That second route is the faster one when you're working through a delivery: the list shrinks as you go, and what's left is what's left to do.

Telling the units apart: each row shows the unit's UID, which matches the ID printed on the side of the physical unit; a unit heard from in the last 20 minutes is tagged "reporting now", which singles out the one you just plugged in; and a cellular unit that is online shows the town it last reported from, so a unit reporting near one of your stores all but names its own assignment.

Cellular units also report where they physically are (from their cell-tower fix, roughly daily). When that position sits far outside the accuracy radius of where the unit is configured, its page shows a location warning with the nearest configured stores — either the unit is assigned to the wrong store (reassign it), or the configured pin is simply wrong and a one-click button adopts the device's reported position for this unit's map pin and forecasts. Nothing moves without that click, and the change is recorded in the activity log.

Below that, the HeatAlert Connect units section shows your whole fleet the way you think about it — region, then market, then store, then the sensors in each. A store with no sensor yet is called out rather than simply absent, because during a rollout that is the thing you are looking for.

A sensor that has never reported is marked differently from one that reports but isn't counted yet — those are different problems with different fixes.
Closed stores are listed separately, dimmed. They stop alerting and stop being billed, and keep their readings and compliance history.

Moving a unit to a different store keeps its readings. History belongs to the hardware; the assignment says which store's record those readings count toward from now on.

Assignment lives in two places on purpose: the fleet view on Stores & locations (best for working through many units), and the Store & alerting card on each unit's own page (best when you are already looking at one). Both run the same underlying change, so it does not matter which you use. The unit page's card also shows who is contacted for this unit and what happens if nobody acknowledges — the escalation chain that actually applies, resolved the same way an alert would resolve it.

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