Push notifications - what reaches the phone, who gets it and how to switch it on

The administrator moved a booking, the specialist found out in the evening. The bell in the CRM did its job honestly - the tab was simply closed. Push closes exactly that gap: the notification reaches the phone while nobody is looking at the app.

Where this lives in the CRM

• Switch, devices and events: Settings - Notifications.
• The log of recent deliveries - same page, at the bottom.

What a notification is in BeeSection

One event, three channels at once: a record in the bell, an instant update of the open screen and a push to the phone. A single service does all three, so "it came to the bell but not to the phone" is always a setting rather than a half-sent notification.

Two consequences worth knowing up front:

• A notification you have already read is not chased to the phone. If you opened the bell before the queue reached your device, nothing arrives there. That is deliberate: chasing something already read serves nobody.
• A company-wide notification never goes to a phone. It has no recipient, so there is no device to send it to.

Internal chat messages work the other way round: they reach the phone but do not land in the bell, because chats keep their own unread counter.

Subscribing a device

Open Settings - Notifications on the device that should ring, and switch notifications on. The browser will ask for permission - that request is the subscription. Every device subscribes separately: the specialist's phone, the tablet at reception and the office computer are three different records.

The page lists the active devices and the history: when each one subscribed, when it stopped and why. A device you no longer want can be disconnected from there - the phone of an administrator who has left, for example.

The "Test" button sends a trial notification to all of your devices. If the test reports that there is nowhere to send it, you have no subscription, and the event switches are not the problem.

The iPhone has one condition. In an ordinary Safari tab push does not work at all - not in our app, but in the system. The app has to be added to the Home screen (Share menu - Add to Home Screen) and notifications switched on from there. The step-by-step guide is in the article about installing the app.

Which events arrive

The event catalogue is split into nine groups: bookings, chats, calls, tasks, leads, money, inventory, subscription and system. Inside them are the concrete occasions: an online booking, a booking made for a specialist, a cancellation, a reschedule, a no-show, a prepayment, a client message, a missed call, an assigned task, an overdue task, a new lead, a reminder to call back, a refund, a till mismatch, payroll approved and paid, low stock, an expiry date approaching, a failed write-off, and subscription and promo events.

Almost all of them reach the phone by default. Four are off by default, each for its own reason:

• task completed - the author sees it in the bell; waking a phone for that is pointless;
• lead updated - the most frequent event in the funnel and almost never urgent;
• yesterday's till digest - it arrives on a schedule and needs no reaction;
• export ready - exports are ordered while sitting at a computer, and the finished file is visible in the interface.

Any switch can be changed. A whole group toggles at once, and a changed event has a "reset" button - it does not tick the box back by hand, it removes your departure from the default. The difference matters: if we ever change a default, it will reach you instead of staying hidden behind an old choice.

Quiet hours and "phones only"

Two limits that apply to the whole subscription:

• Quiet hours - an interval during which push does not arrive. An interval across midnight behaves as expected: 22:00 to 08:00 is the night, not twenty-two hours of silence.
• Phones only - notifications go to mobile devices and not to the office computer. Useful for an administrator who keeps the CRM open all day anyway.

A notification that falls inside quiet hours is not postponed until morning - it is simply not sent. It is in the bell and stays there.

Why a notification did not arrive

Every delivery and every skip is written to the log, and a skip always carries a reason. The full list of what can appear there:

• notifications disabled - the master switch;
• type muted - you turned off a whole group;
• event switched off - the switch of that particular event;
• quiet hours - it fell inside the silent interval;
• no devices - not a single active subscription;
• devices filtered out - "phones only" is on and the subscribed device is a computer;
• push not configured - that one is on our side, and we see such cases ourselves.

Plus a refusal from the mobile platform, in which case the log holds the error text. If a device refuses five times in a row, its subscription is dropped: usually that means the app was deleted or the browser data cleared. Devices that have received nothing for half a year are dropped too.

Separately, three reasons a subscription never started at all: the browser does not support notifications, the app is not on the iPhone's Home screen, or permission is denied in the system. The last one cannot be fixed inside the app: permission is reset in the browser or phone settings, and only then can it be asked for again.

What to do today

Subscribe the specialist's phone and the administrator's phone, leave the defaults alone and set quiet hours to match the salon's working day. Come back to the log in a week: the events you do not need are visible there, not on the settings page.