How notifications and alerts work
Three separate things sit behind the word "notification": a feed of what has happened, a push to a phone or a laptop, and an email. This is which is which, and what triggers each one.
On this page
CleanFlo raises alerts on its own for a small, fixed set of events. It does not invent things to tell you about, and there is no digest, no "you might like", no engagement nudge. If the bell has a dot on it, something happened that you asked for by running a cleaning company.
The bell sits in the top bar, between the theme toggle and the help button, and grows a small teal dot the moment there is anything unread. Click it and a panel drops down. On a phone the same panel comes up from the bottom of the screen as a sheet, with a dimming scrim behind it, because a dropdown anchored to the top-right corner of a phone is unusable.
The notification panel
The panel is headed Notifications. Beside that heading, and only while something is unread, sits a link-button reading Mark all as read. Clear the lot and the link disappears along with the dot on the bell.
Every row follows one pattern: the actor in bold, what they did in plain text, then the thing they did it to in bold again. Something the system did rather than a person, such as an invoice being marked paid by a webhook, shows the target alone in bold with no actor in front of it.
The stamp on the right is relative for as long as that is useful, then absolute.
| Age of the event | What the stamp reads |
|---|---|
| Under a minute | Just now |
| Under an hour | 5m ago |
| Under a day | 3h ago |
| Under a week | 2d ago |
| A week or more | 12 Aug |
The four tabs
Under the header sits a strip of four filters. They are not four different inboxes: they are four views of one list, split by how the thing reached you.
- All
- Everything, newest first. Where the panel opens.
- Emails
- Anything that also left as an email: an invoice, a schedule, a low-stock alert.
- Notifications
- Anything that was pushed to a device.
- Activity
- Things that happened inside the account without leaving it.
The coloured chip on the left of each row tells you what area it came from, and the colours are consistent across the whole product: green for cleans, amber for invoices, teal for clients, sky for inventory, blue for staff, red for health and safety, and a muted grey for anything the system raised itself.
Turning push notifications on
Browser push is off until you turn it on, and the offer to turn it on lives inside the notification panel rather than as an unprompted browser popup on your second click. That is deliberate: the person opening the bell is already the person who wants alerts.
The card is headed Get clean alerts and reads "Know when a clean is assigned or finished, even with CleanFlo closed." Beside it is a primary button reading Turn on, which becomes Enabling… while the browser prompt is up. Accept the browser prompt and the card disappears for good.
There is no notifications tab in Settings. Push consent belongs to the browser, so the only two places it is offered are this card and, for cleaners, the Push Notifications group on the Me tab of their phone app.
Everything that sends by itself
The list is short and it is fixed. Nothing below can be switched off individually, and there is no per-event preference screen.
To the cleaner
| What happened | Push title | Also posted in their thread as |
|---|---|---|
| A clean is created and assigned to them | New clean assigned | New clean assigned |
| A clean they are on is edited | Clean updated | Clean updated |
| A clean they are on is cancelled | Clean cancelled | Clean cancelled |
| A clean they are on is deleted | Clean deleted | Clean removed |
| A clean changes status some other way | Clean status changed | Nothing |
| Their fortnightly schedule is emailed out | Schedule updated | Schedule sent |
| Time off is approved or declined | Time off approved or Time off declined | Time off |
Assignment, a change of day and a cancellation are the three that matter, and they are the three that get sent twice on purpose. A push is gone the moment it is swiped away. The same event is also written into that cleaner's conversation with you as a system message, so it is still there on Tuesday when somebody says nobody told them.
To you
- Invoice paid, when an invoice is settled.
- Supply request, when a cleaner asks for stock from inside a clean.
- Time off request, when a cleaner asks for a day.
- A health and safety push naming the incident type and its severity, whenever an incident is logged.
- A low stock email, sent once per threshold crossing, listing the items that need reordering.
To the client
Clients have no login and no thread, so everything aimed at them is email: the invoice or quote itself, an overdue reminder, a job-completed note, a cancellation, and a lost-property note if something is found. Those are sent by you from the relevant screen rather than fired automatically.
The cleaner side of alerts
A cleaner controls their own alerts from More, then Settings, in the phone app.
More
This phone
Tell the office
What you are carrying
- More: their work, what they carry, and Settings.
Messages on your phone lets a cleaner know when a clean is assigned, updated or cancelled, even with CleanFlo closed. Once on, it reads Turned on. If they refused permission, it says alerts are blocked and that they need to allow notifications for the site in their browser settings. Daily briefing sends a morning notification and email with the day's cleans, at the time they choose under Send at.
The Daily Briefing is the one alert that is on by default. It sends a morning notification and an email listing that day's cleans. The send time is a select rather than a clock: 05:00 through to 10:00 in half-hour steps, defaulting to 07:00. Set it to when the round actually starts, not when you would like it to.
Keeping the bell useful
- Use Mark all as read once a day rather than picking rows off. The feed is a record, not a to-do list: marking read does not delete anything.
- If you only want to know about money, sit on the Emails tab. Invoices and low-stock alerts both leave as email and both land there.
- The Activity tab is the one to open when somebody says "I did change that" and you want to know when.
- Turn push on once, on the machine you actually work from. Turning it on in a browser you use twice a year is how you end up with alerts on a laptop in a drawer.
One thing the bell is not: it is not a place cleaners look. Cleaners get their alerts on their own phone and their instructions in their own thread. Nothing you do in this panel reaches them.
Common questions
Can I choose which notifications I get?
Why has nothing arrived on my phone even though push is on?
A cleaner says they were never told a clean moved. Can I prove otherwise?
Does marking everything as read delete the history?
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