Workplace access links explained

When you send an invoice or a booking confirmation through Sessional, the email that lands in the workplace inbox carries a secure link back to a Sessional-hosted page. The finance officer, the roster coordinator, or whoever you addressed it to clicks through and sees the detail laid out clearly: who the invoice is from, the total in Australian dollars, the line items, and any note you attached. There is no sign-up, no password, and no Sessional account to create. The link itself is the key.

Invoice links live at /w/inv/<token> and booking links at /w/bkg/<token>. The token is a long, signed string that only Sessional can produce, and it expires 30 days after the email is sent. These pages are marked no-index, so they never show up in a search engine even if a link is forwarded on.

From an invoice link the recipient can:

• View the invoice in full: invoice number, issue and due dates, line items, the total due, your payment reference, and any note you left.
• Mark paid: tell you the money has been sent or is scheduled, with an optional reference or note (for example, the date and bank reference they used).
• Raise a dispute: explain in a few sentences what is wrong, for example a wrong amount or a session that was not worked.

From a booking link the recipient gets a read-only view plus one action:

• View the booking: date, start and end times (Sydney time), the agreed rate, and your site notes.
• Acknowledge the confirmation, so you have a record the workplace saw and accepted the booking detail.
• Raise a dispute: most often used to say “we did not book this” before the shift happens, while there is still time to sort it out.

A booking link is deliberately not a payment surface. Money only moves once you raise the invoice after the shift, and that invoice email carries its own link with the Mark paid action.

The reason for the two-step is practical. Workplaces are not Sessional users, and a busy finance team can pay the wrong invoice, the wrong amount, or reference the wrong job. If a click silently marked the invoice PAID, it could quietly distort your earnings record, your GST position, and your tax reserve. So the claim is just a signal: the workplace tells you what they have done, and you decide what is true.

When a workplace submits a claim, you get a notification in your in-app inboxand a row appears in the “Needs your attention” area of your dashboard. From there you check your bank and either confirm the payment, which moves the invoice to PAID on both sides, or dismiss it, which clears the claim and lets auto-chasers pick up again. The action is idempotent: if a coordinator double-clicks, refreshes, or opens the link in two tabs, only one claim and one notification are recorded.

When a workplace raises a dispute on an invoice, three things happen:

• An open dispute record is created against that invoice, with the reason they typed (between 5 and 500 characters).
• The invoice moves to DISPUTED, which pauses the auto-chaser schedule so no automated reminder emails go out while the dispute is open.
• You receive an in-app notification, visible in your inbox and on the dashboard attention row.

Only one dispute is open at a time per invoice. If the workplace submits again, the existing record is updated rather than a second one being created, so your inbox does not fill with duplicates. You resolve the dispute from your invoice list: adjust and re-issue if they were right, or move the invoice back to its chasable state if they were not, at which point reminders resume.

Booking disputes work the same way on the workplace side, but a booking has no money attached and no disputed status to flip, so raising one simply creates the record and notifies you. The point is to catch a problem early, before the shift, so you can cancel or correct it. See booking messaging for the back-and-forth that often resolves these before they become a formal dispute.

You control every link you send. If you addressed an invoice to the wrong email, or a finance contact has left the workplace, you can revoke that single link from your dashboard. Once revoked, anyone opening the old URL sees a “this link was withdrawn” page and the underlying actions stop working, returning a clear gone response rather than exposing any detail. Revocation is specific to that one invoice or booking; it never affects your other links or your account.

The full invoice detail is also in the body of the email itself, so revoking a link does not strip a workplace of the information they need. The link is a convenience layer on top, not the only copy.

Each link is signed with HMAC-SHA256 using a secret held only on Sessional’s servers. The signature covers the invoice or booking it points to and a fixed 30-day expiry, so a recipient cannot tamper with either or forge a link to someone else’s invoice. The actions exposed by a link, Mark paid and Raise dispute, are scoped to that one entity. A link reveals nothing else about you, your other clients, or your earnings.

The action endpoints are rate limited per link and per source, so a forwarded URL cannot be used to spam claims or disputes. Because the link is the key, treat it like one: it is meant for the inbox you addressed, and the on-page guidance asks workplaces not to share it publicly. Workplace access links are available to every Sessional locum on every plan, including Free.