Messages waiting and the notification bell

The messages icon and the bell sit together in the top bar, but their numbers mean different things. Messages counts conversations the shop still owes a human answer. Notifications counts feed items this signed-in person has not seen. Neither number is a count of rows in the small drawer.

What waiting means in Messages

A conversation is waiting when its latest real message came from the customer, or when the only answer after it was automatic. An after-hours or other automatic reply acknowledges the message but does not pretend a person handled it. The conversation stays waiting until somebody at the shop has the last word: a reply to the customer, or an internal note.

Some messages need no answer — “Confirmed, see you then.” is one. Marking it read clears the unread count but not waiting, because reading is not answering. While a conversation is waiting it shows No reply needed under its header. Pressing it takes the conversation off the waiting count without sending the customer anything: it leaves an internal note in your name saying so, and marks the conversation read. The note is the record of who decided, which is the question somebody asks later if the customer says nobody got back to them.

The whole inbox — All conversations from the messages panel — opens at the side of the screen and has the same Unresponded chip, beside All, Assigned to me and Unassigned, with the waiting count on it — every waiting conversation, not eight. Pressing a row there opens that conversation in the same place, over the screen you were on; a new tab or a Ctrl-click opens it in a tab of its own.

The badge is a full-shop count over every live conversation you may open that is not marked done. The drawer is only an eight-thread peek at the same inbox. When twelve conversations need answers and eight waiting rows fit in the peek, it says 12 waiting · showing 8. Open Messages to work the whole inbox; the summary never turns eight displayed rows into a false total of eight.

Use All to see the eight newest conversations whether answered or not, or Unresponded to see the eight newest that are still waiting. That is a list of its own, not the waiting rows that happen to be among the newest eight, so a customer who wrote yesterday and was then buried under newer, answered conversations is still there. Both chips read the one stored classification the badge counts, so a chip and the number above it cannot disagree. Internal notes do not count as a customer or automatic reply. Demo and test threads are excluded from a live shop's count, and another organization cannot contribute to it.

Reading a row in the messages panel

Each row is the customer's initials, their name, how long ago the last line landed, that line itself, and who is looking after the conversation — a person's name, or Unassigned. A conversation without an owner says Unassigned in quiet text rather than a warning badge; it is a fact to sort out, not an alarm on every row.

The whole inbox is quieter still. A row there shows the owner's name under the preview when somebody owns the conversation and nothing at all when nobody does; its Unassigned chip is how you find those. Assigning is done inside the conversation, from its … menu, where Assign sits beside the list of people.

The preview is prefixed with whoever said it: You when the shop spoke last, the customer's own first name when they did, Auto-reply when the only thing after them was automatic, and Note when the last line was internal. A message you sent as a text and an email at once is quoted by what you typed, not by the email wrapped around it — the same pairing the conversation uses to draw the two as one bubble. The word in front comes from the same stored classification the chips and the badge use, so a row cannot read You while the count above it treats that conversation as waiting.

A number on the corner of the initials is that thread's unread count, which is a third question again: how many inbound messages nobody at the shop has opened.

In the panel's header, the magnifier opens a search box that hands the question to the whole inbox rather than filtering the eight rows in front of you — a real name that happens to be the ninth conversation must not come back as nothing. The plus beside it starts a new message: it turns the panel into a customer search, and typing part of a name, a phone number or an email lists the matching customers with their phone and email. Pressing one opens that customer's conversation beside your work, even if nobody has written to them yet. It is only drawn for roles that may open the customer list.

Point at a row and three controls appear on it — on a touch screen they are always there: an envelope to Mark as Read or Mark as Unread, a tick to Mark as Done, and … with the same two in words. Done takes the conversation off the panel, off Unresponded, off the waiting count and out of the whole inbox, and marks it read; the panel names it with an Undo button in case it was a slip. Nothing is sent and nothing is written in the conversation. It comes back by itself the moment anything new is said in it — the customer writing again, a reply from the shop, or an automatic reminder — but not for an internal note, which is the shop talking to itself.

At the foot, Open Messages is always drawn. When nothing matches, the panel says No conversations yet. under All and Everybody has been answered. under Unresponded, because those are different facts and deserve different sentences.

The bell and what it reports

The page loads the bell's number with the rest of the shell, but it does not load the notification list until you reach for the bell — point at it, tab to it, or touch it. The second time you open it, the last list shows at once and the new rows replace it as soon as they arrive. If the first list takes more than a moment the panel says Loading notifications...; if it cannot load, the rest of the shop stays usable and the full notifications page remains the fallback.

The number on the bell is the number of unread rows the list will hold when you open it. Anything the list leaves out for you — something you did yourself, or a car that is not yours if you are a technician — is not counted either, so the badge does not promise rows the bell will not show.

The bell opens a separate feed for selected events: customer authorizations, payments and refunds, bookings, completed inspections, finished jobs, received parts, QC bypasses, discount decisions, closed disputes, new work requests, mentions and support replies. It is deliberately not every audit event and it omits your own routine actions. Each row links only to a screen your role may open.

A row is the kind of event in small capitals, the sentence, when it happened, and the car or person it is about. A payment against an invoice the shop has marked settled also carries a Fully Paid pill, because a deposit and a final settlement otherwise read identically and only one of them means the car can go. The pill follows the invoice as it stands now, so a refund that reopens the invoice takes the pill with it, and it never appears beside a refund.

A finished chargeback appears as Dispute won, Dispute lost or Dispute withdrawn, naming who recorded the outcome, and it opens the dispute rather than the order — a dispute may name no order at all. Withdrawn is drawn as neither good news nor bad, because nobody won it; the processor simply stopped asking.

A Work request row means somebody wrote in through your public form and nobody has answered yet. It leaves the feed as soon as the enquiry is moved out of the new state, and no score ever hides one: the lead queue sorts on its spam score and never filters, and a bell that quietly dropped an enquiry would lose exactly the work the queue exists to catch.

Both new rows are gated on the doors they open. A closed dispute is shown only to somebody who may take payments, which is the key the dispute screen itself asks for, and its figure is printed only for somebody who may see revenue — the row still arrives either way, with Amount hidden — money visibility is off for your account where the money would be. A work request needs the customers key, which is the front desk as well as the advisor.

A disputed amount is shown in the dispute's own currency rather than the shop's. The figure is frozen from the payment that was charged back, and a cross-border charge must not be relabelled by the surface reporting it.

Seen, read, and the full page

Opening the bell marks the newest feed item as seen for your membership, clears the badge optimistically and leaves the new markers visible in the open drawer so you can still tell what just arrived. Mark all read in the panel clears those markers on the copy you are looking at. It is not a second write — opening the bell already did the writing — and it disappears once there is nothing left to clear.

The same list has a no-JavaScript page at /notifications, reachable from Open Notifications at the foot of the panel and by following the bell itself. There, use Mark all seen when unread items remain; that one does advance the watermark on the server.

Beside that door, Notification settings opens the Notifications card of Your profile — the same screen the account menu reaches as Your notifications, where you choose which kinds appear in your own notifications. It is a separate control with a separate name because it settles a different question from the list beside it, and switching a kind off there removes it from your notifications and stops it counting.

The drawer says Recent shop activity, not the audit trail. The full page is headed Notifications and says What happened while you were working. With nothing in it, the page and the panel say the same sentence: Approvals, payments, bookings, work requests, finished inspections, and mentions appear here.