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Every feature in Zion, from homework and attendance to meetings and billing, sends updates through one notification pipeline. Each authenticated role, administrator, supervisor, monitor, parent, and student, has a personal notification bell and a full notification history, plus a preferences page to control what arrives and how.
WhatsApp is wired into the notification system but is only active for the categories a caller explicitly enables. There is no organization-wide WhatsApp toggle. In-app and email are the two channels every role can rely on.

The notification bell

Every dashboard header carries a notification bell. It works the same way for every role:
  • An unread-count badge shows on the bell, capped at display “99+” once unread notifications pass that count.
  • Clicking the bell opens a short list of recent notifications: a popover on desktop, a full-width sheet on mobile.
  • A “See all” link in that list opens the full notification history for the current portal.
Staff reach their history at /notifications. Parents and students see the identical component at /parent/notifications and /student/notifications.

The notification history page

The history page groups notifications by date (Today, Yesterday, Earlier) and loads more as you scroll. It has two tabs:
  • Inbox, for active notifications.
  • Archived, for ones you have filed away.
You can narrow the list with search, a category filter, a read/unread filter, and a date-range filter.

Row and bulk actions

ActionScope
OpenReads the notification and, where relevant, takes you to the related record
Mark read / unreadSingle row or bulk-selected rows
Archive / unarchiveSingle row or bulk-selected rows
SnoozeSingle row
DismissSingle row
Select allApplies bulk actions to every visible row
Snoozing and dismissing only affect the individual row you act on. Bulk actions apply to whatever rows are currently selected.

Where notifications come from

Notifications are grouped into categories, and the categories a person sees depend on their role. A parent, for example, only sees categories relevant to their child’s records (homework, attendance, meetings, report cards), while an administrator sees the full organizational set, including billing and staff-management categories. Features across Zion that dispatch through this pipeline include:

Goal Check

Goal-marking and ritual reminders

Attendance

Attendance alerts and daily marks

Homework

Assignment and verification updates

Meetings

Booking, requests, and scheduling changes

Grading

Score entry and moderation updates

Broadcasts

School-wide and centre-wide announcements

Notification preferences matrix

At /profile/notifications, every role sees a grid of the categories they can receive, with a toggle per channel: In-App, Email, and (where eligible) WhatsApp.
  • The In-App and Email columns always show.
  • The WhatsApp column appears only if your role has at least one category that is WhatsApp-eligible.
  • The matrix is opt-out: a missing preference row means the channel stays on by default. Turning a toggle off stops that category from reaching you on that channel.
  • The list also includes any category you have actually received a notification for, even if it is not yet part of the standard catalogue for your role.

Delivery settings: digest and quiet hours

Below the preferences matrix, each person controls how their email notifications are timed:
1

Choose Immediate or Digest

Immediate sends one email per event as it happens. Digest batches your notifications into a single daily summary email instead.
2

Set quiet hours (optional)

Enter a start and end time, in your organization’s local time, during which email (and WhatsApp, where active) is held rather than sent. Both a start and an end must be set together, or neither.
3

Save

Held notifications are released once the quiet-hours window ends. In-app notifications are never held or batched: the bell and history page stay live regardless of your digest or quiet-hours settings.
By default, delivery mode is Immediate and no quiet-hours window is set.
Digest and quiet hours only govern email and WhatsApp. Anything sent in-app appears on the bell and in your history the moment it is dispatched.

Broadcasts

Compose and send school-wide or centre-wide announcements

Deliverability and audit

Email suppression handling and the organization-wide notification audit log

Roles and permissions

What each of the five roles can see and do

Alerts

Threshold-based alerts that also flow through this pipeline