Most reports fall into four causes. Working out which one you are looking at is faster than reading about the feature, and it is usually enough.
| Cause | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| A role | the page or button is missing entirely, for you but not for a colleague |
| A plan or an installation switch | the page is missing for everyone, including administrators |
| Meta | WhatsApp refused something, and the product is reporting that refusal |
| Configuration | the feature is there, you used it, and the result was not what you expected |
Start with who you are
More "it is broken" reports are a role than anything else. An agent sees only the inboxes they are a collaborator on, and no settings at all. A custom role sees only what it was granted, and the permission list is shorter than people assume — it has no entry for inboxes, channels, campaigns, WhatsApp templates, flows, automation rules or audiences. Roles and permissions has the exact list.
If a colleague who is an administrator also cannot see it, stop looking at roles. It is a plan or an installation-level switch, and nothing in your account changes those.
Then find your symptom
| Symptom | First thing to check | Where it is explained |
|---|---|---|
| No WhatsApp messages are arriving | the inbox's Account Health tab | when WhatsApp does not work |
| I cannot type a reply, only send a template | when the customer last wrote | the 24-hour window |
| A template was rejected or paused | the rejection reason on the template | the template lifecycle |
| A campaign says Completed but nobody got it | whether the template is still APPROVED | WhatsApp campaigns |
| My template is missing from the campaign dropdown | its status, category and components | WhatsApp templates |
| A conversation is not in my list | the status filter, then your inbox membership | work in the inbox |
| An agent cannot see an inbox's conversations | the inbox's Collaborators tab | set up an inbox |
| An automation rule did nothing | that the rule is switched on | automation rules |
| A flow never started | that it is published, on a WhatsApp Cloud inbox | flow builder |
| An import skipped every row | labels that do not exist, or missing country | import contacts |
| An audience matches nobody | whether your labels are on contacts or conversations | labels or shared audiences? |
| Orders are not showing beside a conversation | whether the contact matched a store customer | Customer 360 |
| An order action I need is not offered | the per-platform table | what each platform supports |
| My endpoint is not receiving events | that the URL is publicly reachable | webhooks |
| I cannot find out who changed a setting | whether that action is audited at all | audit logs |
What leaves a trail, and what does not
Before you spend an hour looking for a log, this is what exists.
| Area | What you can inspect afterwards |
|---|---|
| Campaigns | per-recipient outcomes, with a reason, where your installation has campaign analytics |
| Flows | Sessions on the flow: where each run ended and why |
| the inbox's Account Health, and each failed message's own reason | |
| Configuration changes | audit logs, for the fourteen event types it covers |
| Automation rules | nothing. There is no run history and no per-rule log in the product |
| Webhooks | nothing. No delivery log, no retry, no replay |
| Imports | the import's own result counts |
Where the answer is "nothing", the practical approach is to reproduce the trigger deliberately and watch what happens, rather than to search for a record of the first time.
Four things no amount of configuration fixes
- Meta owns template verdicts, quality ratings, messaging limits and display-name decisions. The product reports them. It cannot appeal or override them.
- Messages sent to a WhatsApp number while its webhook was missing are gone. There is no backfill.
- Out-of-hours behaviour cannot be built with automation. There is no business-hours, time-of-day or working-hours condition. An inbox's own business hours and unavailable message are the tool for that — see set up an inbox.
- Refunds and cancellations cannot be delegated to a custom role, on any platform.
Who can do this
Agents can see most symptoms but almost none of the causes: Account Health, inbox configuration, templates, campaigns, automation and audit logs are administrator-only. If you are an agent, your useful contribution is a precise symptom — which conversation, which number, what time — and then escalating.