04 · Notifications

Three ways of being told something needs you: in the app, in the daily email, and on your phone. This chapter explains what each one carries, who decides, and how to set your own.

1. Counts and events, and why they behave differently

Everything the app tells you is one of two kinds, and the difference explains almost everything else on this page.

A count is something still true right now. 3 bookings to approve. 2 overdue invoices. You do not need it kept for you, because the work itself is the record: finish it and the number falls to zero on its own.

An event is something that happened and is then over. A safety check logged as failed at 6am. A customer cancelling overnight. A member's card declined. Deal with the freezer at 7am and the count of open faults is back to zero, so if nobody wrote the event down, the owner arriving at 9 would never learn it happened at all.

Counts live in the bell and on your dashboard. Events are kept in Notifications until you have read them, and they are the only things that can reach your phone, because they are the only ones with a moment to buzz at.

2. The bell

The bell in the top bar shows a live count and lists what is waiting. It is meant to reach zero: it carries things somebody is waiting on you for.

Standing backlogs are deliberately not in the bell. Money owed, stock to reorder, a licence expiring: those never reach zero, and a red dot that never clears teaches people to stop looking at red dots. They live on the dashboard's attention card instead, and the preferences screen tells you which ones those are.

Under the live lines, the bell also keeps a short history: everything that happened in the last 15 days, read or not, newest first, in a list that scrolls inside the bell. Read lines sit dimmed; anything you have not seen yet is marked New. Opening the bell to glance at it reads nothing. Clicking a line reads that line and takes you to it.

Select Show all in the bell to open Notifications, which has no cut-off.

3. The Notifications page

Everything that has happened and you have not cleared, newest first. Opening the page clears the bell, the way an inbox does, but each line keeps the New chip it arrived with, so the thing you came to look at does not vanish as you look at it.

Select a line to go to whatever it is about. Select ✕ to clear one, or Clear them all to clear the lot.

These are the things kept here:

Two more can reach your phone without being kept here, because the bell already counts them: a notice posted to the team (on to start with, for everyone who can read announcements, except whoever posted it) and a team chat message (off until you switch it on). Each team chat channel shows as one notification that keeps itself up to date, rather than one per message.

A shift on your roster, a swap you're part of, a job visit, a booking with you and a booking's team are yours, not the business's: they are about your own work, so you get them whatever your role is, and no manager permission is needed. Nobody is told about a change they made themselves. Anyone who can see bookings already hears about every booking change, so they are not sent a second, personal copy, and a booking that has a job is told about once, as the job. A new booking is news once it is real: straight away when there is nothing to pay, once the payment goes through, once a request is approved, so never about a checkout somebody gave up on.

Cleared notifications are removed permanently after 90 days.

4. Choosing what you are told, and how

Your own, on My work

My work → What you get told about.

One row per notification, grouped by area, with a switch per channel:

• In the app, which governs the bell and the dashboard together. Which of the two a line lands in is a property of the line, not a choice.
• Daily email, whether it joins your morning summary.
• On my phone, whether it buzzes a device you have switched on in section 7. This column only appears once your workspace has notifications set up, and only on your own screen: see section 7 for why nobody else can set it.

Some rows have no switch in a column, and say why instead of offering a control that would do nothing:

• Straight away, already emailed the moment it happens, so repeating it in the morning would be the same news twice.
• Not emailed, a figure the dashboard works out for its own cards, with no email behind it.
• Ongoing, a running count rather than something that happens at a moment, so there is nothing for a phone to buzz at. See section 1.

A phone is never the last thing standing. A browser can throw its own notifications away without telling anybody, so a line marked 🔒 can't be silenced keeps the app and the email holding the floor between them; the phone is always yours to switch off.

Your choice always wins over the business default. An owner changing the default later does not undo what you have set.

The business default, per role

Settings → Notifications (needs Manage settings).

Pick a role from the dropdown and set what somebody in that role is told out of the box. This is a starting point, not a rule: anyone can then change their own. It is keyed to your own roles, so a cafe that invents a "Head Chef" gets a notification profile for it without anybody touching code.

Some lines start on for one role and off for another. Anything about money is the obvious case: booking balances charged and booking balances failed to charge arrive for owners and managers out of the box and are off for everyone else, including any role you invent later. Every one of them is still a switch, so you can turn a money line on for a supervisor, or off for yourself, and your choice is what sticks.

Money that was, or was not, taken

If the app charges a balance to a saved card automatically, two lines can tell you about it:

A failed charge leaves the balance as unpaid, so the booking still shows the money as owing and it can be collected another way. Only a charge that actually settles marks a balance paid.

Work you have just won

If you let customers accept quotes online, the moment one of them types their name and accepts, the quote becomes Accepted and a job opens itself.

The line names the customer, the amount and the job number, and opens the quote itself. Switch the email off in Settings, Notifications if you would rather just see the bell.

Your customer is emailed their own confirmation at the same time, that their acceptance has been received. That one is part of accepting online rather than a notification, so it is not on the preferences screen and it always goes.

Two things a preference can never do

1. Show you something you are not allowed to see. You are never told about a page your role cannot open. That is access, not a preference, and no setting lifts it.
2. Silence an alarm. A few lines are marked 🔒 can't be silenced. You can move one between the app and email; you cannot send it nowhere. A freezer logged at 19°C is exactly the thing that must not be switchable off six months before it matters.

5. When somebody says they cannot work

My work → Availability, for your team. What you get is on this page.

A team member marking a day off is two different pieces of news depending on how close it is, so it reaches you two different ways.

Inside your notice window, you hear straight away. One email, that day, naming the date. Set your window under Roster settings. Even with no window set, a change about today or tomorrow always reaches you immediately, because that is a shift that needs covering.

Everything further out waits for the morning. At 7am you get one email per person, listing every day they marked since yesterday, with runs of days gathered up:

Anna has marked 36 days unavailable Saturday 26 September 18 to 24 October 19 November to 5 December

If two people both marked days, you get two emails, one each. That is deliberate: two people being away is two things to solve, and putting them in one email makes both easier to miss.

The bell always shows it either way, as a single line counting the days.

6. Seeing every email you send

Settings → Email templates.

Notifications decide who hears about something. This page shows what is actually sent, which is the question your customers ask rather than your staff.

Every email your business sends is listed, grouped by who opens it: your customers, your team, you and your managers, and the ones that come from us about your account. Open any row and it tells you what sets the email off, who receives it, and shows an example. The examples use made-up names and figures, because the real wording is built from the booking or invoice it is about.

Anything you have switched off is left out, so a business with no memberships never sees membership email on the list.

There is a search box. Type a word from the email itself, like deposit or roster, if you cannot remember what it is called.

Finding the ones you can change

Three buttons above the list: Everything, You can re-word, and, once you have changed some, Your wording. Any row you have re-worded is marked, so you can see at a glance what is yours without opening each one.

Sending yourself an example

Tick any of them and press Email me an example. They arrive in your own inbox looking exactly as a customer would see them, with made-up names and figures, and with your own wording if you have written some.

They go only to the address you sign in with. There is no box to type another address into, on purpose.

Ten at a time. If you tick more, the rest stay ticked for a second press. A row that covers two messages, like a request approved and a request declined, sends one of each, and the button says how many are coming.

Which words you can change

Each row carries a label saying whether the wording is yours:

• You write this one. Invoices, quotes, campaigns and replies. The whole message is already yours.
• You can add your own note. The app writes the structure and you add a paragraph in your own voice. Booking reminders and form acknowledgements work this way today.
• Fixed wording. It cannot be changed, and the row says why. There are three reasons: it states what has happened to money, it is a security message, or it comes from us about your account.

That last one is deliberate, and it is worth a sentence. A paragraph you write today is still being sent in six months, to somebody whose card may have been declined this morning. So the app keeps every figure, date and payment fact, and a business writes the voice around it. Where a note is offered, the amounts come from the booking itself rather than from anything typed.

Writing your own

On a row marked you can add your own note, open it and you will find a box already holding the wording we send today. That is deliberate: you can change two words rather than write an email from nothing, and if you open it, read it and close it again, nothing has changed.

Underneath the box are tokens. Each one is a fact we fill in from the real booking when the email goes out: their first name, what they booked, the day and time, your business name. Press one to drop it in where your cursor is. Use them rather than typing a name or a date yourself, because a paragraph you write today is still being sent in six months.

On the booking emails, Where ({place}) says where that booking happens: your business name, the customer's own address for something you travel to, or online for a call. It means the same as it does on a reminder, so a business that runs a shop and a mobile round can write one sentence for both.

Our own wording follows where a booking happens. On a service you travel to, or one held online, the reminder asks whether the time still suits rather than whether they are still coming, forms are asked for before our visit or before we meet, the feedback request thanks them for booking rather than for visiting, and your address is left out of the small print. The table is in Bookings, A6b.

A preview under the box shows what the customer will actually read, filled in with example details. It is built by the same code that sends the email, so what you read there is what arrives.

Nothing important can go missing. Some of these emails carry a sentence they cannot go without, like the one warning that a deposit will be asked for if a request is approved. If your words leave it out, we add it back underneath rather than dropping it, and the box tells you we will before you save.

Go back to ours puts our wording back and removes yours, so there is always a way home.

Your words always win. Wording you save is sent exactly as you wrote it, and nothing we change in our own wording touches it. The facts we fill in, such as the deposit line, what is owed and the calendar link, keep their wording too.

How our own wording is kept. Every email about a booking greets the customer by their first name, and the small print says why they are receiving it in words that stay true: you have a booking while it is ahead of them, you had a booking once it is cancelled, you sent a booking request for a request or a decline, and you joined a waitlist for a waitlist place. Amounts always show the cents and a thousands separator.

Two emails share a row where the message is really two: a request approved and a request declined, and a booking confirmed with or without a card payment. They get a box each, because one paragraph cannot serve both.

7. On your phone

My work → On your phone.

A notification on your phone with the app closed. It carries the events only, for the reason in section 1.

This one is yours alone. The business sets a starting point for the bell and the morning email, because those are its own surfaces. Nobody's employer decides what makes their phone buzz on a day off, so there is no business-wide switch for this and no way for anyone else to turn it on for you.

It is also per device. A phone and a tablet are switched on separately and listed separately, and each can be removed on its own. Ten devices are kept per person; switch on an eleventh and the one you have not used for longest drops off the list by itself.

Which notifications reach it is then set per line in section 4's On my phone column. Switching a device on here is the doorway; that column is the detail.

Switching it on

On an iPhone or iPad, notifications only work once the app is on your home screen; Apple does not offer them to a website in a Safari tab.

1. Open your workspace in Safari and sign in.
2. Tap Share, then Add to Home Screen, then Add.
3. Open the app from the new home screen icon (not from Safari again).
4. My work → On your phone → Turn on for this device, then Allow.

On Android, Windows or a Mac, no install is needed: My work → On your phone → Turn on for this device, then allow the browser's prompt.

Then use Send me a test. Push is the one channel where "it is switched on" and "it actually arrives" are different claims, so there is a way to find out rather than assume. All we can see is that the push service accepted it, so if nothing appears within a few seconds, check notifications are allowed for the app in the device's own settings.

A number on the app icon. Where the device supports it, the icon carries a count of the notifications still waiting on that phone, and it clears when you open the app. It is not the same number as the bell: the bell also counts standing work like bookings to approve, which never buzzed anything.

On Android and desktop Chrome this works. On an iPhone or iPad it usually does not, whatever the app is able to ask for: the number stays off the icon even though the notification itself arrives. The card on My work tells you what your own device does, and the notification is the part to rely on.

What arrives

Everything arrives the normal way for your device, and how loud that is stays your phone's business, not ours. What we set is urgency: an alarm is sent as high urgency, so a sleeping phone is woken for it, and on a computer it stays on screen until somebody deals with it. Everything else is sent as normal urgency and waits for the phone to be picked up.

If a quiet pocket matters more than the notification, switch off the events you do not want on the card, or turn sound off for the app in your phone's own settings. Nothing is muted on your behalf: an unnoticed notification is the same as one that was never sent.

Tapping a notification opens the app at whatever it is about.

If the card is not there, or the button is missing

The card works out what it is looking at and gives you the steps for that device, so you should not need this table. It is here for completeness.

Privacy

The notification itself is encrypted to your device. Google and Apple carry the message without being able to read it, and the keys it is encrypted to are never readable by anyone, including you, once your browser has handed them over. Removing a device stops it immediately.

8. Permissions

There is no permission for notifications. What you are told follows the permissions you already hold, and the Notifications page shows only the lines written for you, so it needs no gate of its own: a manager cannot read a colleague's alarms there.

Related: Dashboard & navigation · Reminders & digests · Safety & cleaning · Roles & permissions