Notifications, Jobs And Messages

Your application talks back to you in several different places: a small colored message in the corner of the screen, a strip across the top of the page, a bell in the top bar, an inbox tray next to it, and e-mail. Each one behaves differently, lasts for a different length of time, and is used for a different kind of message. This chapter explains all of them, so you know where to look and what you can safely ignore.

What This Is

There are five channels the application can use to reach you, plus mobile push if your organization has a companion app.

Error windows — the pop-up that says something went wrong while processing your request — are a separate subject and are covered in When Something Goes Wrong.

Why It Matters

Most of these messages are the only confirmation you will get that something happened. There is no activity history in the application that replays them for you, and only some of them are stored anywhere at all. If you learn which ones vanish and which ones stay, you will stop losing important information — and stop worrying about messages that were never meant to be kept.

Toast Messages

A toast is the small colored card that slides into the bottom-right corner of the window after you save a record, run an action, or hit a problem. Several can stack on top of each other. Each one has an icon on the left, the message text, and a small close cross on the right.

If the AI assistant panel is open, the toasts move up slightly so they are not hidden behind it.

What The Colors Mean

Colors are part of your application's theme and your administrator can restyle them, but the standard set is:

The two you must never ignore are red and amber. A red toast means your work was not saved. An amber toast usually means the form was rejected ("Some fields are incorrect. Please revise the form.") or that something completed with a caveat, such as an export that had to stop early.

They Disappear, And There Is No History

A toast hides itself after roughly five seconds and is then removed from the page completely. There is no message center, no "recent messages" list, and no way to bring it back. If you looked away, it is gone.

This is worth internalizing, because the platform uses toasts for genuinely important messages — including error text explaining exactly why a save failed.

Example You click Save on a supplier record and immediately switch to your mail client. When you come back, the pop-up window has closed and nothing seems wrong. In fact the save failed on a duplicate value and a red toast said so for five seconds. The record still shows the old values — which is the clue you should trust.

If A Toast Vanished Before You Read It

Work backward from the data rather than trying to recover the message:

1. Look at the record or list you were working on. If your change is visible, the operation succeeded.
2. If you were in a pop-up window, reopen the record and check the field you edited.
3. If you were running an action on selected rows, check a couple of the rows you selected.
4. If you were exporting, open the Jobs inbox (see below) — the job row survives even though the toast did not.
5. Once you have established that your change is not there, repeat the operation. Take particular care with anything that creates a record: repeating a create makes a second record rather than replacing the first, and there is no undo.
6. If you cannot tell, and it matters, ask your administrator. Many applications keep an event log that records what happened at that moment.

Toasts And Pop-Up Windows

When you save inside a pop-up window, the confirmation toast still appears in the page's bottom-right corner, not inside the window. On a laptop you will see it beside or below the pop-up. On a narrow screen the pop-up sheet can cover it entirely, so you may never see the confirmation at all.

Example You open a project from a list, click Add task in the related list, fill in the pop-up form and save. On a phone, the green "Record created." toast is drawn behind the sheet you are looking at. The reliable confirmation is the new task appearing in the list underneath once you close the pop-up.

Pop-up behavior in general is covered in Pop-Up Windows.

The Sign-In Screen Is Different

On the sign-in, registration and password screens there are no toasts. The same messages are shown as static strips stacked above the sign-in card, and they stay there until you navigate away. That is deliberate — those messages ("Login failed.", "Your login has expired. Please sign in again.") are ones you must be able to read at your own pace. See Signing In.

The Banner Strip

A banner is a full-width message strip that appears under the top bar, above the page content. It is visually a wide colored block with a close cross on the right, and it can contain formatted text and links.

Banners are the closest thing the application has to an announcement. They are used for messages that everyone on a screen should see: a planned outage, a deadline, an instruction about a process that changed this week.

Three things to know:

• They do not disappear on their own. A banner stays until you close it or move to another page.
• Closing one is not permanent. Banners are produced fresh each time a page is drawn. If the condition that raised it still applies, it comes back on your next page load. There is no "I have seen this" memory.
• They are not stored anywhere. Once the page is gone, so is the banner. If it contains a date or an address you need, copy it somewhere before you navigate away.

Banners only exist if your administrator has set something up to raise them — there is no built-in banner and no screen where you can browse past ones.

Example Your finance application shows an amber banner on every page during the last three days of the month: "Month-end close: invoices dated before the 1st can no longer be edited after Thursday 18:00." You dismiss it to get it out of the way; tomorrow morning it is back, because the rule that raises it is still true.

The Notification Bell

The bell icon in the top bar is your personal message list inside the application. It only exists if your administrator has granted your role access to notifications — if you do not have a bell, that is why.

Where Notifications Come From

A notification exists because someone or something in your application sent it to you. It is addressed to one of three things:

• you personally,
• your group (everyone in the same group receives it), or
• one of your roles (everyone holding that role receives it).

That is why two colleagues sitting side by side can legitimately have different notification lists — see Why Your Screen Differs.

There is no built-in event that produces notifications. Everything in the list was configured deliberately: an approval routine, a nightly check, an escalation rule, or a person triggering an action. If you expect to be notified about something and never are, it has not been set up.

The Unread Dot

A small colored dot on the bell means you have unread notifications. Be aware of how it is calculated, because it is not perfectly reliable:

• When a page loads, the dot reflects your true unread count.
• After you open the panel, the dot is recalculated from the batch of items currently loaded (the first ten). If all your unread items are further down the list, the dot can switch off while unread items still exist.
• Reading a notification does not clear the dot immediately. It clears on your next page load.

The practical rule: treat the dot as "there is probably something new", not as an exact counter. If you want a truthful state, reload the page.

Opening The Panel

Click the bell. The panel opens under it with the heading Notifications and loads the first ten items — pinned ones first, then newest first. Each row shows:

• a colored indicator bar on the left, and bold text, when the item is unread;
• the title;
• optionally a short piece of message text underneath;
• optionally a date;
• a pin icon on the right if the item is pinned.

If there is nothing to show you get a bell-with-a-slash icon and "No new notifications."

Clicking inside the panel — on Load more, for example — does not close it, and it survives moving to another screen inside the application. Clicking anywhere else on the page closes it, as does clicking the bell again.

Two quirks worth knowing:

• The list is fetched once per page load. Closing and reopening the panel shows you the same list; new items appear after a page reload (or by themselves, see Live Updates).
• If the list cannot be loaded at all, you also see "No new notifications." An empty panel is therefore not proof that nothing was sent to you.

Load More

If there are older items beyond the ten you were given, a Load more button appears at the bottom of the panel and appends the next ten. When the button is absent, you have reached the end of what the panel can show you.

Opening A Notification

Clicking a row does two things: it marks the notification as read, and — if the notification carries a link — it takes you straight to the linked page. For linked notifications you will never see a detail screen; you land directly on the record or list the sender pointed you at.

If the notification has no link, you get a small detail page instead, headed Notification details: the title, a validity line reading "Valid from … until …", and the full message.

Example A purchasing application sends "Order #4821 is waiting for your approval" to everyone with the Approver role. You click it in the bell; the application marks it read for you only — your colleagues still see it as unread — and opens order #4821 directly. Your colleague opening the same notification a minute later also lands on the order, and now both of you have read it independently.

Pinned Items And Validity Windows

Two properties of a notification change how long it is visible and where it sits:

• Pinned items are sorted to the top of the list, ahead of everything else, and are marked with a pin icon. Use them as the "still relevant" section — they are typically standing instructions rather than events.
• Validity window. A notification can carry a "valid from" and a "valid to" date. Outside that window it is not shown to you at all. A notification can therefore appear on its own on a future date, and can disappear from your list without anyone deleting it.

This is why the detail screen shows "Valid from … until …": those are the dates that decide whether the item is in your list today. Missing bounds are printed as three dots, which means "no limit on that side".

Example An HR application pins "Holiday requests for December must be submitted by 15 November" and gives it a validity window of 1–15 November. It appears at the top of everyone's bell on 1 November, sits above the day-to-day items, and vanishes by itself on 16 November. Nobody has to clean it up.

The Notifications Centre

At the bottom of the bell panel there is an All link. It opens a full page titled Notifications centre with a card headed Timeline — the same items, with more room to read them, its own Load more button and a "That's all" line at the bottom of the card.

Use that screen when you want to read through what has been sent to you rather than react to one item. One difference from the bell is worth knowing: from that screen, an item that carries a link opens the link without being marked read. The same item opened from the bell is marked read. If you want an item marked as read, open it from the bell.

What You Cannot Do With Notifications

Be realistic about the feature set. In the application itself there is:

• no way to opt out or mute. If a notification is addressed to your role or your group, you get it.
• no channel choice. You cannot ask for these by e-mail instead, or turn e-mail off in favor of these.
• no digest or frequency setting.
• no "Mark all as read". Items become read one at a time, by opening them from the bell.
• no delete, archive or hide control.
• no filter, search or unread-only toggle in the list.

All of these are decisions made when the notification was sent. If you are getting too many, or the wrong ones, that is a conversation with your administrator about who the sender addresses — see What To Ask Your Administrator For.

The Jobs Inbox

Next to the bell there is a second tray icon. It is labeled Pending jobs and opens a panel headed Jobs. Every signed-in user has it; there is no permission to grant.

What Lands Here

Work that takes too long to make you wait for it is moved into the background, and the tray is where you watch it. In practice this means exports: when you export a list to a spreadsheet, the file is built in the background and appears here. (Administrators see a few other long-running tasks here too.)

When the job starts you also get an information toast: "Export started — the file will download once it's ready. Keep this tab open."

Job Statuses

If the application can no longer find the file — because it has expired or been cleared away — the row is dropped from your tray rather than marked as finished, and you normally get a warning toast saying the export is no longer available.

Each row shows the job title, the status line, the file name where it differs from the title, and a time stamp. A dot on the tray icon means something is running, or a finished file has not been downloaded yet.

Download And Remove

Every row has a Remove button (a cross) which deletes the row from your tray. It does not cancel anything and it does not delete anything on the server — it only tidies your list. Finished rows also have a Download button (a downward arrow) that fetches the file again.

The Three Things That Surprise People

1. Keep a page open. The tray is watched by the page you are on. The export itself carries on being built even if you close the tab, but while no page of the application is open nothing is watching it, so the automatic download will not happen. Moving between screens in the application is fine, and if you come back later the tray picks the job up again — provided the file has not expired in the meantime.
2. The list lives in this browser only. Job rows are stored by your browser, not by your account. A job you started on your office desktop is invisible on your laptop, on your phone, and in a private window. If you clear your browsing data, the list is gone with it.
3. Finished files expire. A completed export is kept on the server for a short window only — on the order of an hour or two. After that the file is gone: the row disappears from your tray, usually with a warning toast telling you the export is no longer available. There is no way to recover it; run the export again.

There is one more practical wrinkle: the download starts by itself rather than from a click, and a browser may block a download that starts that way. The row still says Ready, so use the Download button manually if nothing arrived.

Example On Friday afternoon you export 12,000 invoices. The toast tells you to keep the tab open, the tray shows "Running…", and you carry on working in another tab. Ten minutes later the file downloads by itself and the row turns to Ready. On Monday you open the application on your laptop, look for the file in the tray and find it empty — because the row belonged to Friday's browser, and the file expired that afternoon anyway. The fix is to run the export again.

Exporting itself — what the file contains, its limits, and the truncation warning on very large exports — is covered in Action Buttons And Exporting.

Live Updates And Refreshing

Some parts of the application update themselves and some never do. The distinction catches people out regularly.

Updates by itself:

• the Jobs tray. While a job is running, the tray checks on it by itself every few seconds, so a finished export can flip to Ready and download without you doing anything. This does not depend on live updates being available.
• the notification bell, but only if your application is set up for live updates. The unread dot can light up while you sit on a page, and if the panel happens to be open the list refreshes. This happens only for notifications addressed to you personally.

Never updates by itself:

• record lists, boards, calendars and dashboards. Nothing on a data screen changes because a colleague changed a record. What you are looking at is what was true when the screen was drawn.

To see current data, use the refresh control on the list, which re-runs your view exactly as it stands — same filters, same sorting, same page. See Saved Views And Queries.

There Is No "Connection Lost" Indicator

Live updates are a bonus, not a guarantee. They depend on your application being set up for them and on your network allowing them, and when they are unavailable the application says nothing at all — everything keeps working, with no live updates.

So do not use "nothing has arrived" as evidence that nothing happened. If you are waiting on a notification or an export and the screen has been quiet for a while, reload the page. That re-checks the unread count, re-reads the Jobs tray and re-draws the bell from the server.

Example You are waiting for an approval notification that a colleague promised to trigger. Ten minutes pass with no dot on the bell. Rather than assume they forgot, reload the page: notifications addressed to a role or a group — as approvals often are — do not arrive live at all, and only show up when a page loads.

E-Mails The Application Sends You

Some messages have to leave the application. The platform itself sends a small, fixed set:

Beyond these, your application can send its own mail — order confirmations, approval requests, reminders, weekly summaries. Those messages, their subjects and their timing were all designed for your organization, so their content is not something this guide can describe. Some applications also send text messages the same way.

The links in these e-mails are deliberately short-lived, and the message tells you its own deadline where one applies. The sign-in and verification flows themselves are covered in Signing In.

"I Never Got The E-Mail"

Work through this before reporting a fault:

1. Wait a minute or two. Delivery is not instant, and some messages are sent in batches rather than one at a time.
2. Check spam, junk and quarantine. Automated mail from a business application is a classic false positive.
3. Check the address on your account. Open your profile and confirm the e-mail address there is the mailbox you are watching — see Your Profile And Account.
4. Check any rules or shared mailboxes. Mail addressed to a group alias may have been filed by someone else's rule.
5. Ask a colleague who should have received the same message whether they got it. If nobody did, it is a configuration issue, not a mailbox issue.
6. Request it again if the screen offers that — for example by asking for a new password-reset link. Old links stop working once a new one is issued.

If nothing arrives for anyone, tell your administrator. There are two settings only they can check, and both produce exactly this symptom with no visible error anywhere in the application:

• outgoing mail can be switched off entirely for the application; and
• a testing configuration can divert every message to one or more fixed addresses — mail is still sent, but it all lands in the test mailboxes instead of with the intended recipients.

Neither is visible to you. If you are on a test or training copy of your application, assume the second one is in force until told otherwise.

Mobile Push Notifications

If your organization has a companion mobile app, your application can also send push notifications to your phone. This is a separate channel, and it exists only where a companion app has been built for your organization.

What to expect if yours does:

• Push messages are sent to a specific device that has been registered with the application. A new phone has to be registered again by the mobile app; there is nothing to do in the web application.
• Push and the bell are independent. A push message is not automatically a bell notification, and opening a push does not mark anything read in the web application.
• All the on/off controls live on your phone, in your device's own notification settings for that app. The web application has no push preferences, no per-topic toggles and no test button.
• Delivery is best effort. Push messages can be delayed or dropped by the phone's operating system, so they are not a substitute for checking the application.

Tips And Gotchas

• Read toasts before you look away. Five seconds is short, and error text appears only there.
• Amber is not "fine". A warning toast after a save usually means the form was rejected or something completed with a caveat.
• A quiet screen is not confirmation. Nothing about a record list changes on its own; refresh it.
• The bell and the tray look alike. They sit next to each other and use the same panel styling. The bell (bell icon) is messages from people and processes; the tray (inbox icon) is your own background work.
• An empty bell can mean "could not load". If you were expecting something specific, reload the page before concluding it was never sent.
• Do not rely on the unread dot as a count. It is worked out from the first batch of items in the panel.
• Read a notification from the bell, not from the Notifications centre, if you want it to count as read.
• Notifications can vanish legitimately. A validity window that ends removes an item from your list; you did not miss a delete.
• Copy anything you need out of a banner before navigating — banners are not stored.
• Leave a page open while an export runs, and download the file straight away — it expires within an hour or two.
• Job rows are per-browser. Do not expect to find yesterday's export on a different machine.
• Close buttons can be hard to see on the lighter colored toasts, amber and cyan, where the cross is drawn in white. You do not need to close a toast — it closes itself.

What To Ask Your Administrator For

You cannot configure any of this yourself. These are the requests worth making, phrased so they can be acted on:

• "Please give my role access to notifications" — if you have no bell at all.
• "Please stop sending me notification X" or "please send it to role Y instead of everyone" — the audience is chosen by whoever set the notification up.
• "Please make notification X pinned" or "please give it a validity window" — for standing instructions that should not scroll away.
• "Please add a link to notification X" — so it opens the relevant record instead of only describing it.
• "Please add an e-mail for process X" — if something important currently only appears as a toast you keep missing.
• "Is outgoing mail enabled, and is it being diverted to a test address on this environment?" — the two invisible causes of missing e-mail.
• "Can live updates be turned on for our application?" — if the bell never lights up without a reload.
• "Can this export be scheduled and mailed to me instead?" — if the expiry window keeps beating you.
• "What does this banner mean and when will it stop?" — banners come from a rule, and someone knows which one.

Related Chapters

• The Application Window
• When Something Goes Wrong
• Action Buttons And Exporting
• Comments And Mentions
• Signing In