Notifications FAQ
Answers to common setup and operating questions about platform notifications.
For what the system is and how to set it up from scratch, see the
Notifications Overview.
Setup
Do I need to enable each channel separately before notifications go out on it?
Yes. Master toggles for email, SMS, and push live in Admin → General Settings under their own settings pages (Email Settings, SMS Settings, Push Settings) — not on the Notifications page. If a channel is off there, no notification of any kind goes out on that channel regardless of per-feature toggles. In-app notifications are always on and have no master toggle.
What roles can configure notification settings?
All notification admin pages — global settings, custom rules, analytics, and logs — require the Admin or Super Admin role in the current business. Managers and employees cannot access them. The one exception is the Advanced Notification Settings view (availability, skill, and conflict checks), which any authenticated user can read but only admins can edit.
Can I edit another employee’s notification preferences?
No. Each employee manages their own preferences at Account Settings → Notifications. There is no admin override path — admins cannot change another user’s per-category or per-channel preferences anywhere in the product.
Permissions and access
Which notifications can employees not opt out of?
Employees can turn off any notification type or channel in their own preferences — there are no locked checkboxes, and admins cannot lock one. A few messages are delivered whatever those preferences say, because the message itself is marked as one that must arrive:
- Emergency alerts reach every person on the channels the alert was sent with (in-app, push, text, call), even on a channel they switched off and during their quiet hours. Email still stops if the person turned email off entirely. Reminders to acknowledge an alert follow the person’s channel preferences, but they are urgent, so they come through quiet hours.
- Critical broadcasts reach people by in-app, email, push and call on the channels the broadcast uses, whatever their preferences and quiet hours. A critical text still needs a verified phone and stops if the person turned texts off, replied STOP, or their number can’t receive texts.
- Service Desk after-hours alerts reach the agent on duty for an unclaimed ticket, and their manager if it stays unclaimed, in-app and on the push or text channels the team set. The email copy follows their email settings.
- Lone Worker SOS escalations reach the responders by text and call whatever their preferences.
- Required emails — password resets, sign-in codes, and notices the platform must deliver such as legal and benefits notices, signature requests and receipts — send whatever the person’s preferences, unless the address or its domain is blocked, or it bounced before.
Texts, push and calls still stop at a channel your organization has turned off. Push reaches a phone signed in to the mobile app, or a browser where the person turned notifications on while your organization’s browser notifications are on. Broadcast texts and Lone Worker SOS texts go only to a verified phone, and calls need a verified phone only if your organization requires it.
Who can create and delete groups?
Creating, editing, and deleting groups requires the Admin or Super Admin role. System-created default groups cannot be deleted. A group something still uses cannot be deleted either — a notification rule, a broadcast, a home dashboard, a wiki page, a Communications audience, a survey, form, SOP, Training automation or onboarding template’s audience, a read audience, app access, a scheduling team, an app setting such as the Speak Up adviser panel, or content it owns. Its Delete is disabled and names what uses it; change or delete that first.
Day-to-day
When do digest emails go out?
Daily digests are sent at 8:20 AM UTC. Weekly digests are sent at 8:30 AM UTC on Mondays. These are fixed schedules. By default, admin and manager roles receive daily digests for lower-priority categories (libraries, wellness programs, company store, timekeeping, leave, onboarding, goals), while employees stay on immediate delivery. Urgent and transactional emails always deliver immediately regardless of digest cadence.
What is the daily email cap and what happens when it’s hit?
Every recipient has a per-day ceiling on throttleable emails. The default is 15 emails per day per recipient per business. Once the count is reached, further non-urgent, non-transactional emails are deferred into the digest rail rather than sent individually — nothing is lost. The cap is configurable per business via the daily email cap setting on Admin → Notifications → Settings. Setting it to 0 disables the throttle.
How does escalation work?
Escalation fires only for events with high or critical severity. The default three-step sequence is: step 1 sends in-app and push (waits 5 minutes), step 2 adds SMS and email (waits 10 minutes), step 3 adds voice (no further wait). Both the steps and timing are configurable per business.
What does “Right to Disconnect” actually suppress?
When enabled at Admin → General Settings, it suppresses push, SMS, and voice for covered workers (frontline, hybrid, non-exempt, or hourly) who are off shift (no open attendance record, no current shift assignment). In-app and email still land. Urgent and mandatory dispatches (critical broadcasts, emergency alerts) bypass the suppression. Employees have no toggle — this is entirely business-controlled. Default: off.
What does on-floor suppression do?
When a location has Quiet non-urgent notifications while on the floor turned on, workers clocked in at that location have push, SMS, and voice notifications demoted to in-app only. Email still lands. This is for environments where phone use is restricted. The toggle is per-location, set by anyone who can edit the location (admins, or managers with location-edit permission). Default: off.
When something looks wrong
“I sent a notification but the employee says they never got it”
Check Admin → Notifications → Logs. Each log entry shows whether the notification was delivered or blocked, and blocked entries include the specific reason. There are 13 suppression reasons, worded in the log as: the recipient’s email address is blocked after a previous bounce; the recipient disabled that channel entirely; blocked by system-level settings; the channel is disabled at the business level; that notification type is disabled in business or app settings; blocked by a custom notification rule; disabled in the recipient’s notification preferences; the recipient opted out of that category on that channel; blocked by notification settings; the recipient does not belong to this business; the source record is sample or demo data; suppressed during a historical data import; and quiet hours. Suppression records are retained for 90 days.
“An employee’s email stopped working — they get nothing”
The most likely cause is an auto-block from bounces. After a soft bounce retries 3 times (with exponential backoff) and still fails, the system escalates to a hard bounce: the email address is added to the global blocked list and the user’s email channel is disabled. Check Admin → Notifications → Analytics where you can clear soft-bounce flags and re-enable a user’s email delivery. For SMS, the same auto-block triggers on permanent Twilio failure codes (unreachable handset, invalid number, landline, carrier violation).
“Voice calls aren’t going through at night”
Voice calls have their own quiet-hours window: 9 PM to 8 AM in the user’s timezone. Non-urgent calls are rescheduled to 8 AM. After 5 reschedule attempts, the call executes regardless. Urgent calls bypass voice quiet hours entirely. Additionally, the platform limits concurrent voice calls to 10 globally — if all slots are busy, calls queue and run as slots free up.
“Notifications are coming through even though quiet hours are on”
Business-level quiet hours (default 10 PM to 8 AM) only suppress disruptive channels: push, SMS, and voice. In-app notifications always land, and email cadence is handled by the digest system, not quiet hours. Urgent notifications — emergency alerts and the reminders to acknowledge them among them — go through quiet hours. Emergency alerts, critical broadcasts, Service Desk after-hours alerts and Lone Worker SOS escalations also skip quiet hours on the channels they were sent with.
“We’re running out of credits for texts”
Texts draw on your organisation’s one platform credit balance — 3 credits per text message, the same balance AI, voice and metered apps use. See the balance, and buy a credit pack, on Admin → General Settings → Billing & Payments → Credits; admins are warned when the balance drops below 500 credits by default. Check how many texts you are sending at Admin → Notifications → Analytics. SMS also has three rate limits: a per-business daily limit (hard ceiling up to 500,000), a per-business monthly limit (up to 5,000,000), and an optional per-recipient daily limit. Once any limit is hit, no further SMS can be sent and further SMS notifications are suppressed. Alert SMS bodies are truncated to 320 characters (~2 segments). Critical broadcasts can span up to 10 segments (1,530 characters).
Retention and limits
How long are notifications kept?
In-app notifications are archived after 30 days (read or unread) and permanently deleted after 90 days from archival. Notification suppression records (the log of why a notification was blocked) are retained for 90 days. Broadcast ledger records (audience snapshots, delivery states, acknowledgements) are retained for 7 years after a broadcast is archived.
Are there limits on push notification size?
Yes. FCM push payloads are limited to 4,096 bytes (4 KB) — this is an FCM/APNs platform limit. Title and body are trimmed to fit. Push messages for offline Android devices are queued for up to 28 days. In-app notifications are bulk-inserted in batches of 1,000.
More help
- Notifications Overview
- Ask AI — the assistant answers notification questions from these articles.