Notifications
The bell tells you what happened while you were looking somewhere else — and nags when a new lead still hasn't been called.
The Notifications bell sits at the top of the sidebar, under Search. It carries a count of everything you haven't read yet, and clicking it slides open a panel of what's happened recently. Every row links straight to the thing it's about. On the first page you open after signing in the count can appear a moment after the page itself — it waits until the page's own data has had its turn; on every page after that it is there immediately.
The bell is deliberately not a second to-do list. Today is still where work lives — the queue is what you work through, and the bell is what taps you on the shoulder when you're somewhere else in the app.
What you'll be told about
What reaches you depends on your role. Notifications come in five groups:
- Leads and calls — a new lead from any source, a missed call, a voicemail, and a lead nobody has called yet.
- Patient replies — an inbound SMS, WhatsApp, web-chat or email message.
- Bookings and deposits — an online booking made or cancelled, a deposit paid.
- Reviews and feedback — a new public review, or private feedback from an unhappy patient.
- Problems needing a human — a broken integration, or something that arrived and couldn't be filed automatically. Owners and managers only.
- Team chat messages — a colleague wrote to you in team chat. Every role, including analysts.
Analysts receive no patient or practice notifications: the role exists for reporting and sits outside the care team. Team chat is the one group they hold, so a colleague can still reach them.
The uncontacted-lead nag
A notification when a lead arrives only helps if somebody is already looking at SmileLine. So a lead that still has no contact attempt is raised again at 15 minutes, an hour, and four hours old.
All three stop the moment anyone attempts contact — logging a call outcome, even a no-answer, is enough. Leads that are snoozed, archived, or on a closed journey never trigger a reminder.
This is the same lead set as the New · Call now bucket on Today, so clearing that queue clears the reminders with it.
Reading and clearing
Clicking a row marks it read and takes you to the lead, conversation or booking it refers to: a lead opens in the Today work panel, a booking opens its day on the calendar. If the lead has already been worked and has left today's queue, Today says so and offers you the full patient record instead. Mark all read clears everything currently in your list.
Your unread count is yours. Unlike the shared inbox, a colleague reading their notifications doesn't clear yours — so the count always answers "what have I not seen", not "what has the practice not seen".
Notifications are kept for 90 days and then removed.
Choosing what reaches you, and where
Settings → Notifications lists every category your role receives, with three switches per row:
- In-app — whether it appears in your bell.
- Email — an immediate email to your account address when it happens.
- Push — an operating-system notification on the devices you've enabled below.
Each switch is yours alone: turning something off doesn't affect anyone else. Only categories you'd actually receive are listed — if a group isn't there, your role isn't its audience.
Team chat messages has a push switch only. The chat itself is the in-app surface (its own unread dot at the bottom of the sidebar) and an email per chat line would be noise, so those two channels are not offered for it.
One switch is fixed: the email for An integration stopped working is always on. A broken ad connection can hold incoming leads that expire, so it is not something a preference set months ago should be able to silence. Its bell and push switches behave normally.
Emails go out as things happen — there's no digest to wait for. Urgent categories (a waiting lead, a missed call, a voicemail, a caller the AI couldn't hand off, unhappy private feedback, a broken integration), new leads and Incoming data needs review email you by default; everything else starts off and can be switched on per row. The broken-integration email goes to owners and managers once per breakage — not once per failed retry — and says how many leads are held and by when to reconnect to recover them. See Connected accounts. The needs-review email goes to owners and managers, at most once per item per day however often that item is retried; it stays in the bell as before and never pushes.
Each email carries the details and a button that takes you straight to the lead, call or booking. The subject line never includes a patient's name — subjects show on phone lock screens — but the body does, so you can act without logging in first. The footer of every one links back to this settings page.
Emails ignore quiet hours: they land in your inbox, not on your lock screen, and wait for you there.
Push devices
Under Push devices, click Enable to get pushes on the browser you're using — they arrive even with SmileLine closed. Your browser asks for permission the first time. Every device you've enabled is listed with a Remove button, and you can register up to ten; past that, remove one before adding another.
Like every SmileLine notification on an OS surface, a push never shows a patient's name — it says what kind of thing happened and opens the app for the rest.
- On iPhone or iPad, add SmileLine to your Home Screen first (Share → Add to Home Screen), then enable push from inside the installed app.
- In the desktop app, there's nothing to set up: alerts pop up through the app automatically whenever it's running.
- On the mobile app, push arrives when the app ships.
Quiet hours
Quiet hours silence push notifications overnight — pick the hours and your timezone, and pushes inside the window are skipped rather than saved up (everything is still waiting in your bell and inbox). Two things are never silenced: urgent alerts, and everything that isn't push — your bell and emails are unaffected.