Notifications is the screen behind the bell in the header. It collects everything the school’s own activity generated while you were busy somewhere else: a result published, an application approved, a fee fully settled, a store order validated, a payout confirmed, a logbook waiting for verification. It exists because most of the things that matter in a school happen while somebody else is looking at a different screen.

The bell shows the ten most recent items and a count of the unread ones. Clicking Notifications in the sidebar, or on the count, opens the full inbox: every message for your account, newest first, searchable, fifteen to a page. One message belongs to one account — opening yours does not mark somebody else’s as read.

The menu is opened by a super administrator, an institution admin, a secretary and a bursar. A teacher does not see it: the things that reach a teacher’s inbox arrive as a correction to grade, or as the correction of a submission they marked, and both of those are told to them on the screen where they happened. The distinction is a simple one — this inbox is for the people who run the school, not for the people who teach in it.

Results published

When an administrator publishes a class board, every learner who has a result is told that their results are now visible. This is the single most common notification in a school, and the one worth reading: it means a real person made a decision that families are now seeing.

Admission and enrolment

An applicant is told when their file is approved, and the family is told when the learner’s fees are fully settled — the moment their file stops being a pending file. These are generated by the decision itself, which is why a family is never left wondering whether their child’s place was confirmed.

Money moving

A store order that has been validated or cancelled, a payment that has failed at the operator, a payout whose status has changed: each of these reaches the person who caused it. For a bursar this is the fastest way to catch a transfer that has not gone through, because the notification arrives the moment the status moves rather than the next time you remember to look.

Work waiting for a decision

Corrections you have graded but not released, applications waiting for a review, logbook sessions that nobody has verified: these are not messages, they are the action centre on the Overview dashboard. The inbox tells you what already happened; the dashboard tells you what is still waiting. A school that reads both has nothing left to chase.

Opening a message is not the same as marking it read

Reading and clearing are separate acts, which is deliberate. Open a notification and the message takes you to the screen it refers to — the application to review, the learner to open, the order to validate. When you have dealt with the thing itself, come back and use Mark all as read to bring the counter to zero. This ordering matters: a message marked read but not acted on is a job that has been hidden rather than done.

Mark all as read is safe, deleting is not

Mark all as read only changes how the bell displays the list; nothing is removed and no record is destroyed. The messages stay in the inbox and stay searchable. That is why clearing the counter every morning is a reasonable habit even in a busy week: nothing can be lost by marking, and everything is still there if somebody asks what the school was told and when.

Your inbox is yours

Each account has its own inbox. A secretary’s notifications are not a copy of the bursar’s, and neither of you sees the other’s. When you hand over a duty — a month at the counter, a term in the office — the colleague who takes it sees their own messages for the period they are covering, not yours.

If the bell is empty and the work is not

An empty bell is not proof that nothing is waiting. Work that has been created but not acted on — an unpublished correction, an application with no decision — generates no notification, because no event has happened yet. That is exactly why the Overview dashboard carries an action centre: read it every morning alongside the bell.