Notifications
Assignments, approvals, expirations, and reminders reach the right people over in-app, email, and Slack, with per-user channel opt-outs by topic.
A tells one person that something needs their attention: a job was assigned to them, an approval is waiting, a gauge's calibration lapsed. Carbon fans each one out to up to three channels: the in-app inbox (the bell in the top bar), email, and Slack. In-app is always on; email and Slack are extras a user can mute per topic. One rule holds everywhere: Carbon never notifies you about your own action.
What raises a notification
Notifications are informational, never an approval step. Marking one read changes no record; the action lives on the underlying document, and the notification just points you there.
Topics and channels
Every event maps to exactly one topic, the grouping key for the inbox and for muting: Approval, Job, Sales, Quote, Purchasing, Inventory, Quality, Maintenance, Training, Suggestion, Items, and General. Eleven are user-facing on the settings page; only Items has no toggle.
The channels differ in what they require:
Email is plan-gated: companies without the EMAIL_NOTIFICATIONS plan feature skip the email channel entirely, regardless of the per-user switch. Slack has no plan gate — it only needs the integration. 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 has no switch.
The default is on; flipping a switch off mutes that one topic on that one channel, scoped to the current company. Muting Purchasing on Slack still leaves Purchasing emails, still leaves Slack DMs for Sales, and doesn't carry to another company you belong to. The Slack column appears only when Slack is connected; the email column always shows, with a note when the plan won't deliver it.
Who receives an expiration or reminder
Assignments have an obvious recipient. The time-driven events resolve their own audience: a lapsed gauge calibration notifies a company-configured user list (set under calibration settings), an auto-created dispatch notifies every employee on that work center, and the training reminder is a weekly per-person digest. There is no general "notification group" entity — only gauge-calibration expiry uses a configured list; everything else derives recipients from the record itself.
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.