Notifications and quiet hours
The seven emails the product can send you, and how to stop them arriving at 3am.
Notification preferences are per person, not per clinic. The person who works the waitlist and the person who owns the clinic want different emails, and both are right.
| Notification | Default | Give it to |
|---|---|---|
| New appointment | On | Whoever watches the calendar. |
| Waiting for a human | On | The front desk. This is the one with a clock on it. |
| Booking request | On | Essential if direct booking is off. |
| Waitlist request | On | Whoever works the waitlist. |
| Cancelled by patient | On | Whoever can refill the slot. |
| Rescheduled by patient | On | Same person. |
| Daily digest | Off | The owner or practice manager. Turn it on. |
The daily digest
Off by default and worth turning on. It arrives each morning with today's appointments, pending approvals, new patients and new conversations — short enough to read before the first coffee.
It is the only notification that tells you about things that did not happen — a pending approval nobody actioned, a quiet morning. The others all react to an event.
Quiet hours
Set a window and no notification email is delivered inside it. Messages are not dropped — they are held and delivered when the window ends.
Quiet hours follow your own timezone, not the clinic's. For a clinic whose staff are all in one place they are the same; for a manager travelling, they are not.
Getting this wrong
The two failure modes are opposite and both common. Everyone subscribed to everything means nobody reads any of it. Nobody subscribed to "waiting for a human" means a patient sits in a chat while five people have notifications turned off.
Decide who owns each one, out loud, and set the rest to off.
Common questions
- Can I send notifications to a shared inbox?
- Preferences attach to a person's account, so a shared mailbox would need its own member. One account per person is the better shape.
- Do quiet hours delay reminders to patients?
- No. These are notifications to your staff. Patient reminders follow the appointment.