The bell: what needs you, and clearing it

The bell in the top right counts what has not been dealt with. Click it for the full list: new bookings, booking requests, cancellations, sync failures, payment problems, guest messages, extras a guest has asked for, and double bookings. Everything lands here whether or not you have the matching email switched on, so turning emails off never means missing something — it means reading it in one place instead of two.

Open or dismissed

A notification is one of two things. Open means nobody has cleared it. Dismissed means somebody has.

There is deliberately no "read". Whether somebody glanced at a row is not a useful fact — the guest waiting on a booking request is exactly as unanswered either way — so the only thing tracked is whether you have dealt with it.

Clear a single row with the ✕ at its right, or the lot with Dismiss all. Either way the rows leave the list. Nothing is deleted: Dismissed in the header shows everything you have cleared, and Open takes you back.

Answering from the list

Rows chipped Booking request or Extra request carry Accept and Decline. Using them does the real thing — the stay is approved or the dates released, the guest is emailed, the audit trail records who decided it — exactly as if you had opened the reservation.

The buttons only appear while the request is genuinely still open. If somebody on your team approved the stay a minute ago on another screen, the buttons are gone rather than sitting there ready to do nothing.

The one thing worth knowing

Dismissing a request is not answering it. ✕ on a booking request silences the notice and leaves the guest waiting exactly as long as before.

That is why the calendar's Booking requests count is of reservations rather than notifications: it is the honest answer to "what still needs me", and it does not move when you tidy the bell.

The badge

The count is what is open. It turns red when something has actually gone wrong — a double booking, a failed payment, a calendar link that has stopped syncing — and stays neutral for the ordinary run of new bookings. A permanently red bell is a bell people stop looking at.

Which of these also email you is under Settings → Notifications. The list is the same either way.