Team alerts
Team alerts are the internal side of your messaging: when a customer does something that your team needs to know about — books, cancels, reschedules, pays a deposit, or doesn’t turn up — JustBook tells your team. They’re separate from the messages your customers receive, and customers never see them.
Alerts are set up in two places, and both matter:
- You decide, for the whole business, whether alerts are on and which channels they can use — Settings → Notifications → Team Alerts.
- Each team member decides which events they personally want and where they want them — on their own profile.
Turn team alerts on
Section titled “Turn team alerts on”Open Settings → Notifications → Team Alerts. The Global Settings card holds the master switch. With it off, nothing sends and the alert preferences card disappears from everyone’s profile; turn it back on and everyone’s saved choices return untouched.
Under Active Channels, pick the channels alerts are allowed to use:
- Email — always available.
- Dashboard — the in-app alert list and the unread count in your portal. Nothing to configure and nothing to deliver, so it can’t fail.
- SMS and WhatsApp — available on plans that include them, and only once the channel is set up under Settings → Integrations. A channel that isn’t configured stays greyed out with the reason shown.
A channel switched off here is off for everyone, whatever they’ve chosen on their profile.
Additional email recipients
Section titled “Additional email recipients”The Additional Email Recipients field sends every alert to addresses that aren’t team members’ own logins — a shared inbox, a manager who doesn’t use the portal, your own second address. These addresses receive everything; they have no per-event choice of their own.
What can trigger an alert
Section titled “What can trigger an alert”| Event | Fires when |
|---|---|
| New booking | A customer books an appointment |
| Cancellation | A customer cancels |
| Booking changes | A customer reschedules or edits a booking |
| Deposit paid | A customer pays their deposit |
| Final payment paid | A customer settles their balance |
| Package purchased | A customer buys a prepaid package |
| Gift card purchased | Someone buys a gift card, online or in branch |
| No-show | An appointment is marked as a no-show |
The first three are on every plan. The rest need the plan feature behind them — deposits and no-show protection, online payments, prepaid packages, and gift cards respectively — so an event you don’t have shows as unavailable rather than silently never firing.
Gift card alerts say someone rather than a customer on purpose: a gift card is the one thing people regularly buy from you without having an account, so the purchaser may be a name you’ve never seen.
Alerts are about customer actions. Something your own team does in the portal — an admin moving an appointment, for example — doesn’t raise one.
Choose channels per event
Section titled “Choose channels per event”Below the global settings, each event has its own card listing the four channels. Use these to say how a given event travels: a new booking might be worth an SMS, while a booking change is fine as an email. The Enable all buttons at the top set one channel across every event at once.
An event only sends on a channel that is active globally and chosen by the recipient. Think of it as three switches in series — global channel, per-event channel, personal preference — and all three have to be on.
Edit the alert wording
Section titled “Edit the alert wording”Each event/channel pair has a template you can edit: a subject (where the channel has one) and the message body. Select an event card, then edit or add the template for a channel.
Templates use the same variables as your customer templates — {{customer_name}}, {{appointment_time}}, {{service_name}} and so on, plus your own words for services, stylists and add-ons if you’ve renamed them under Settings → Customer Journey. Select a variable chip to insert it at your cursor. You can restore any template to the JustBook default, and a template you added yourself can be deleted.
Keep the wording short on SMS and WhatsApp — an alert your team reads at a glance beats a complete one they scroll.
What each team member controls
Section titled “What each team member controls”Alerts are per-person, not per-role: two admins can want completely different things. Everyone sets their own under Notifications on their profile (My Profile from your name in the sidebar), and someone with the team permission can set them on a team member’s record.
Each person chooses:
- Channels — email, dashboard, SMS, WhatsApp. SMS and WhatsApp need a phone number on their profile.
- Events — any of the events above that your plan includes.
New team members start with every event on email and dashboard, so nobody is silently missing alerts before they’ve opened their profile.
Scope is decided for them, not by them. A stylist is only ever alerted about their own bookings; admins and receptionists are alerted about all of them. That’s derived from the person’s role and can’t be widened by hand — it’s what keeps a busy salon’s stylists from getting an alert for every chair in the building.
Read your alerts
Section titled “Read your alerts”Team Alerts in the sidebar, under Team, is the dashboard channel: every alert you were sent, newest first, with an unread count next to the title.
- Filter by event, or tick Unread only.
- Select the status pill on an alert to flip it between read and unread.
- Mark All Read clears the count in one go.
Your unread alerts also appear on your dashboard, so you see them without going looking.
The list is tenant-wide rather than branch-scoped: switching branches doesn’t change what you see here — what you see is decided by your own scope, not the branch picker.
When an alert doesn’t arrive
Section titled “When an alert doesn’t arrive”Work down the three switches:
- Are team alerts on at all? Settings → Notifications → Team Alerts, the Global Settings card.
- Is the channel active globally, and set up? SMS and WhatsApp need credentials under Settings → Integrations, and a plan that includes them. Check the channel isn’t greyed out.
- Has the person chosen that event and that channel? Their profile, under Notifications. For SMS or WhatsApp, check they have a phone number on their profile.
Then check scope: a stylist won’t be alerted about an appointment that isn’t theirs, by design.
If all four are right, the Team Alerts tab under Logs shows every alert that was attempted, with its channel and whether it sent — that tells you whether the alert never fired or failed on the way out.
Related
Section titled “Related”- Notification channels — the channels themselves, and what has to be on for anything to send
- Templates — editing customer-facing copy and using variables
- Reports and logs — the Team Alerts log
- Your profile — where you set your own alert preferences