Studios usually find out a delivery is late on the day it is late, when the only moves left are apologising and working the weekend. Both of RecReview’s deadline alarms are built to reach you before that day.
Two alarms, two different problems
Client taking longer than usual is about them: the wait on this task has run past what this client normally takes. Nothing is late yet, and it is a prompt to nudge them.
Deadline at risk is about the arithmetic — even if the client answered right now, the work left no longer fits before the deadline. The promise is already gone, it just hasn’t happened yet.
Both arrive as notifications, and neither is ever sent to the client. Nothing chases your client automatically.
What to do with each
For a slow client, hover the row in the Home view and use Send reminder. It sends a neutral email about the delivery and asks you to confirm first. There is a cap: once you have spent the reminders on a delivery the button disables and says so, on the reasoning that after two unanswered emails the problem is not the email.
Dismiss clears an alarm you have already handled, so the list stays a list of things that need doing.
For a deadline at risk there is no button, because the answer is a conversation. Open the task, change the date, and tell the client the same day. A date moved a week ahead of time reads as a scheduling note; the same message on the due date reads as an apology.
Important: A task sitting in client review is not counted as overdue, deliberately, because the ball is not on your side. The risk alarms exist to catch what the overdue filter is designed to ignore.
Seeing it before the alarm does
Turn on Overdue under Show in the Filter panel to see only what is genuinely late on your side, and sort any view by Deadline or Internal deadline. A Monday scan of the top of that list is the cheapest habit in this article.
Metrics → Deadline health shows the buffer split (Buffer ok, Buffer burning, Buffer gone) plus how many tasks are With the client now. A workspace where most tasks read Buffer burning has a buffer that was sized too small from the start, which is a different problem from a workspace that misses dates.
Renegotiate early, in writing
Studios renegotiate late because it feels like admitting failure, so they wait for certainty. But the case for moving a date is already assembled: the task’s history has the versions, the hours, the resolved comments and the days the client held it. That turns the message from a request for a favour into a report on a schedule.
Move the Due date only once you have said so. It never shifts on its own, which is what makes it a promise rather than an estimate.
What’s next
Agree on the review rounds up front. Many slipped deadlines were an unagreed scope before they were a date.