Notifications
Assignments, approvals, expirations, and reminders reach the right people over in-app, email, Slack, and browser push, with per-user opt-outs by topic for email and Slack.
A alerts one person to an assignment, approval, expiration, or other event. Carbon can deliver it through the in-app inbox (the bell in the top bar), email, Slack, and browser push. In-app delivery is always enabled, and browser push mirrors it in every browser where it is enabled; users can mute email and Slack by topic. Carbon does not notify users about their own actions.
What raises a notification
Notifications are informational. Marking one as read does not change the underlying record or complete an approval.
Topics and channels
Every event maps to one topic, which controls inbox grouping and channel preferences: Approval, Job, Sales, Quote, Purchasing, Inventory, Quality, Maintenance, Training, Suggestion, Items, or General. The settings page exposes eleven topics; Items has no toggle.
The channels differ in what they require:
SESSION_SECRET.Email is plan-gated: companies without the EMAIL_NOTIFICATIONS plan feature skip the email channel entirely, regardless of the per-user switch. Slack and browser push have no plan gate. See licensing.
Muting a topic
Each user controls their own email and Slack delivery under Account → Notifications: a grid with one row per topic, a column per channel, a switch in each cell. In-app and browser push have no switch.
Each channel is enabled by default. Turning off a switch mutes only that topic and channel for the current company. For example, muting Purchasing in Slack does not mute Purchasing email, other Slack topics, or notifications in another company. The Slack column appears only when Slack is connected. The email column always appears and indicates when the plan does not support delivery.
Browser notifications
Above the grid, the Browser notifications card turns them on for the browser you are using. Click Enable and allow the browser's prompt. The bell also offers Enable browser notifications at the top of the inbox until you enable them or choose Not now (it asks once more after 30 days, then stops). Browser notifications are a setting of the browser: once enabled on a computer or phone, whoever signs in there gets their own notifications, from every company they belong to. Signing out — or being signed out — stops the previous user's notifications at once, so a shared computer never shows someone else's. Disable turns them off for that browser, for everyone who uses it. On iPhone or iPad, add Carbon to the Home Screen first — Safari offers push only to Home Screen apps. When Carbon is installed as an app (Home Screen, Dock, or an installed browser app), its icon shows how many notifications are unread across all your companies; signing out clears it. A Chrome app on a Mac shows the count only while its window is open: closing the window clears it, and a notification that arrives while it is closed does not bring it back.
Who receives an expiration or reminder
Assignment events notify the assignee. Time-driven events derive recipients as follows: an expired gauge calibration notifies the user list in calibration settings, an automatically created dispatch notifies all employees at its work center, and the weekly training reminder sends each person a digest. Carbon has no general notification-group entity; only calibration expiration uses a configured list.
The inbox
The bell opens the inbox: recent notifications newest-first with an unread count, each row carrying an icon, a short description, who it came from, and a timestamp. Click through to the record, or mark a row read.