Your notifications inbox

Your notifications inbox is a running feed of operational events that need a decision from you. A workplace pressing a button on a signed invoice link, a dispute being raised, or a shift state changing are the kinds of things that should never quietly disappear into a busy email account. The inbox catches them so they are waiting for you the next time you open Sessional Australia.

You will find it at Notifications in the dashboard sidebar, and as the Inbox tab in the mobile navigation. The events Sessional surfaces here today are:

• Payment claimed: a workplace marked one of your invoices as paid from its signed link, which is a signal to check your bank and then confirm or dismiss the claim.
• Invoice disputed: a workplace raised a dispute on an invoice, which pauses your reminders until it is resolved.
• Booking disputed: a workplace disputed a shift, for example saying they did not book you for that date.
• Shift cancelled and invoice paid: state changes that affect your records, including a payment matched against an outgoing invoice.
• New message and milestones: a reply on a booking conversation, or a one-off marker such as your first shift or first paid invoice.

Each item shows a short coloured label, the headline of what happened, an optional one-line note, and the time it arrived in your local timezone. Disputes are flagged in red, paid claims in amber, and routine confirmations in green, so you can triage the list at a glance.

The notifications inbox and your email preferences are two different channels, and this is deliberate. Your notification preferences decide which emails Sessional sends to your address. The inbox is the in-app channel, and it is always on.

That means even if you have switched off every optional email, an event like a workplace disputing your invoice still appears in the inbox when you next sign in. Email can be delayed, filtered by a hospital mail server, or muted by you on a quiet week. The inbox does not depend on any of that, so the events that affect your money are never silenced by an email toggle.

The inbox is also not a messaging thread. It is a feed of events, not a conversation. If you need to reply to a workplace, that happens in booking messaging, and a new message there will drop a pointer into your inbox so you know to go and read it.

Open Notifications and you will see every event in reverse chronological order, newest first. Unread items carry a brand-coloured ring and a small filled dot, so the things you have not dealt with stand out from the ones you have. Clicking anywhere on a row takes you straight to the surface that needs you:

• A payment claimed item opens your invoices, where you check your bank and then confirm or dismiss the claim.
• An invoice disputed item opens the invoice so you can read the workplace's reason and respond.
• A booking disputed or shift cancelled item opens your shifts.

A paid claim is a flag from the workplace, not an automatic change to your books. Sessional does not flip an invoice to paid on its own, because a mistake in a busy finance team would otherwise corrupt your records. You confirm it once the money has actually landed. The same separation applies to disputes: the inbox tells you one exists, and you decide what to do next.

The page header has a single Mark all as read button that clears your unread state in one action. There is no per-row read toggle: the design assumes you click through to the invoice or shift, deal with it, then come back and mark the list read. Marking everything read is recorded in your account's activity log so there is a trail of when you cleared the feed.

Your unread count also surfaces on the dashboard home. When you have one or more unread items, a tile appears in the Needs your attention row showing how many are waiting and linking straight to the inbox. That row sits alongside other live signals, including pending paid claims, open disputes, and any shifts you have flagged as paid short or not yet paid through pay flagging.

Every notification is tied to your account and is removed automatically if you ever delete your account. The text of each item is cleaned before it is stored: any HTML and control characters are stripped out, and the link a row points to is forced to stay inside Sessional, so a row can never send you to an outside address. This is a security measure that protects you from anything a workplace types into a note field.

The inbox shows your most recent 200 events. That is plenty for day-to-day triage of paid claims, disputes, and shift changes. If you need a record of a workplace action older than that, or you are assembling your full history, you can pull everything out through data export, or contact support and we can look it up for you.

Notifications are a convenience layer, not a financial or legal record in their own right. The underlying invoice, dispute, and shift records are the source of truth, and Sessional does not verify a workplace's claims or provide tax or financial advice. Always confirm a payment against your bank before you treat an invoice as settled.