Customers (CRM)

WhatsApp Status

Overview

A WhatsApp Status is a single text message that goes out from your company's customer-facing WhatsApp number and appears in the Status tray of the people you choose. The screen itself tells you what you need to know before you type a character: "Published from your company's number and visible for 24 hours. Only the people you choose see it, and only if they have saved your number. It cannot be edited or taken back once published."

Reach it from: Switch system → Customer management → Growth → the "WhatsApp Status" tab. The screen is two cards: the publishing card on top, and the "Published statuses" card below it.

How do I publish a status?

1. Open the "WhatsApp Status" tab.
2. Type your text in the "Status text" field — text only, up to 700 characters, with a counter under the field showing how much you've used. (The field hint: "e.g. We close early today at 4pm".)
3. Under "Who sees this", press one or more of your customer tags.
4. Check the large number above the button: "… people will see this status."
5. Press "Publish status." A confirmation appears: "This will publish to … people. This cannot be undone." — along with the full status text. Read it, then approve.
6. On success you see the toast "Status published to …", and a new row is added to "Published statuses."

Who sees the status?

The audience is built from tags alone:

• Every one of your customer tags appears as a button. Press it to arm it, press it again to clear it.
• The selection is inclusive, not narrowing: anyone carrying any armed tag joins the audience. So picking a second tag widens the circle, it doesn't shrink it.
• Anyone with no phone number isn't counted, as the hint says: "Pick customer tags. Only contacts with a phone number are counted." And only the primary number counts: a contact whose only number is an additional value — added with "Add phone" and never made primary — doesn't join the audience. The system doesn't tell you how many were left out for this reason.
• If you haven't tagged your customers yet, the buttons are replaced by: "No tags yet — tag your customers first." Start from Contacts & companies.

The number above the button updates instantly with every press, and it's counted from the audience list itself, not estimated. It may drop slightly after you publish: the server merges duplicate numbers and discards anything that isn't a usable number, so the count in the success toast is the real number of recipients.

Why is the "Publish status" button disabled?

The button starts disabled, and the line beneath it lists everything currently blocking a publish:

Once nothing is blocking it, that same line shows "Left today" with the number of statuses you have remaining out of the five.

Limits and safeguards

A status goes out from a real WhatsApp number, so it's subject to every number-safety control:

• Five statuses per day per line.
• 250 recipients maximum for one status. A larger audience is rejected in full, never trimmed — the system won't pick 250 of them on your behalf.
• 700 characters for one text.
• Quiet hours between 23:00 and 07:00 in your company's time zone: no status is published at night. The attempt comes back with "Quiet hours — statuses are not published at night." The only exception is "Override quiet hours (testing only)" in Settings → WhatsApp — a short window (30 seconds by default, 5 minutes maximum) that expires on its own, and is not a door to publishing at night.
• The line's daily message budget — 200 messages, shared between statuses, campaigns and notifications. A status is charged by its audience size, not as one: every recipient is one message out of the day's budget. If what's left won't cover it, the request is refused before anything is sent and nothing is charged: "Today's budget cannot cover that many recipients."
• Warming up a new number: a line starts on the day it's linked with a ceiling of 30 messages, climbing over seven days to reach 200. So a large audience isn't possible in the first days after linking.
• The line must be connected right now. There's no queue and no retry: if it's down you see "The WhatsApp line is not connected," and nothing is saved to send later.

See WhatsApp notifications for the detail on quiet hours, the sending cap, and warming up a number.

Published status log

The "Published statuses" card at the bottom of the page shows the last 30 statuses from this line, newest first. Each row carries:

• The status text as published.
• The recipient count followed by the word "recipients."
• Its state right now: "live now" while the twenty-four hours haven't elapsed, and "expired" after that.

Before you publish your first status, the card says: "No statuses published yet."

What this screen does not do

• No images, video or audio — text only.
• No "all customers" option, and no picking an individual contact: tags are the only way to form an audience.
• No scheduling and no drafts — there's no "send later"; publishing happens the moment you approve.
• No view report — there's no telling who opened the status; the log only shows how many it was sent to.
• No list of recipient names — who received the status is deliberately not stored; only the count is kept.
• The customer line only — you can't publish from the WhatsApp number dedicated to employees, and that line's log doesn't appear here.
• No mobile interface — a status is published from the web.

FAQ

Q: I published a status with the wrong text — how do I pull it back? A: You can't. No edit, no recall, no delete after publishing — it stays for 24 hours and then expires on its own. The only remedy is publishing a new status that corrects it, provided you still have some of your five left.

Q: The count is over 250 and the button is disabled. A: Because the limit is 250 recipients for one status, and a larger audience is rejected in full. Clear a tag from the selection until the count comes down, or split the message across two statuses with different tags.

Q: The count is far lower than I expect. A: The list is built from your 200 most recent contacts, and anyone without a primary number is then dropped from it — along with anyone whose number is only an additional value that was never made primary. Review your customers' numbers in Contacts & companies.

Q: I tried to publish at night and it was refused. A: Quiet hours run between 23:00 and 07:00 in your company's time zone. Wait for the morning — or use "Override quiet hours (testing only)" in Settings → WhatsApp, which is a short temporary override for testing, not a way to publish at night.

Q: I was told "today's budget doesn't stretch to this many" and I haven't published anything today. A: The budget belongs to the whole line, not to statuses alone, and every recipient counts as one message from it. And if the number was linked recently, its ceiling starts at 30 and climbs over seven days. Shrink the audience or put the publish off until tomorrow.

Q: What's the difference between a status and a campaign? A: A status is one announcement that appears in the Status tray, seen only by people who have saved your number, and it lives 24 hours. A campaign is a sequence of messages that reaches each customer in their own conversation, in timed steps — see Campaigns & drip sequences.

Q: Can my employees publish a status? A: No. Publishing is for the company admin alone, and there's no permission to grant an employee — one press here reaches hundreds of customers from the company's number, and that's the owner's decision.

Q: How many times a day can I publish? A: Five statuses per line, and the "Left today" line shows how many you have remaining.

Q: Can I attach an image to a status? A: No. This screen publishes text only — no image, no video, no audio.

Q: Who saw the status I published? A: The system doesn't show that. The log says how many people it was sent to; it doesn't say who opened it, nor who they are by name.

Quick reference

Related articles

• WhatsApp notifications
• Campaigns & drip sequences
• Contacts & companies
• Customer management (CRM)