The Notifications Tab: Your Alert Inbox

What it is

The Notifications tab is the full history of every alert Verinode has sent you, not just the handful the bell icon shows right now. Verinode raises a notification whenever something happens that is worth your attention: a decision step comes due, a certification is close to expiring, a teammate answers a survey with a low rating, a document finishes processing, or your franchise HQ sends a broadcast. Most of those alerts also show up as a toast or a bell badge in the moment, but once you close that dropdown they are gone from view unless you know where to look. The Notifications tab is where to look. It keeps every alert, read or unread, sent or still queued, dismissed or still sitting there, in one searchable table so you can audit what Verinode has told you and act on anything you missed.

Verinode does not decide what to do about an alert. It surfaces the thing that changed and, where there is somewhere useful to go, a link to open it. You decide whether to act, mark it read, or dismiss it.

Where to find it

The Notifications tab lives inside Vault, the section in the sidebar (/data) that also holds your Uploads and Tracking tabs and your three Lists (Playlist, Reading, Saved). On the Vault home screen, in the row of tiles under Explore, look for the Notifications tile:

• If you have unread notifications, the tile shows that unread count in large type, with the subtitle "Unread" (plus "· N Scheduled" appended if any notifications are queued for the future).
• If everything is read but you have notifications on file, the tile shows your total notification count with the subtitle "All Caught Up."
• If you have no notifications at all yet, the tile shows "Alerts Land Here."

Under the number, a small three-color bar breaks your notifications into unread, scheduled, and read, so you can see the mix before you even click in.

Click the tile and the full inbox opens as an overlay slide, one of four tabs across the top of that slide alongside Uploads, Tracking, and Lists. You can jump straight to it with any Vault link that carries ?tab=notifications, which is how the tile itself navigates.

The table

Once the Notifications tab is open, every alert you have on file (up to the 200 most recent) is listed as a row in a table with six columns:

• Notification. The alert's title. If the alert points somewhere in the product (a decision, a certification, a document), the title is a link, click it and Verinode takes you straight there. Under the title, if the alert has a longer explanation, up to two lines of that body text show as a preview.
• Category. A humanized label for the kind of alert this is, for example Decision Step, Cert Renewal, Vendor Renewal, Survey Low Rating, Goal Progress, Metric Watch, Ingestion, Flow, Report, or Billing. Alerts that were not filed under a specific category read General.
• State. One of four colored pills, explained below.
• Channel. How the alert was (or will be) delivered: In App for notifications that only ever show inside Verinode, Email for ones sent to your inbox, or In-app + Email when Verinode did both.
• When. For anything not scheduled for the future, this is a relative time since the alert was created: "just now," "12m ago," "4h ago," "2d ago," or a month/day date once it is more than a week old. For a notification still queued for the future, this column instead counts down to fire time: "in 45m," "in 6h," "in 3d," "due now" once its time has passed, or a date if it is more than a week out.
• Actions. Up to three small icon buttons on the right, explained below.

Rows that are already read or already dismissed render at reduced opacity, so your eye is drawn to what still needs a look.

The four states

Every notification is in exactly one of four states, worked out from when it was created, whether it has been read, and whether it has a future delivery time:

• Unread, a copper dot and copper pill. Something you have not yet acknowledged.
• Read, a green pill. You have opened or marked this one read.
• Scheduled, an amber outlined pill. This alert has not fired yet, it is queued for a future time (for example, a reminder timed to a decision deadline). Scheduled notifications do not show up in the sidebar bell until their time arrives; the Notifications tab is the only place you can see them queued in advance.
• Dismissed, a gray pill. You explicitly cleared this one from the inbox. Dismissing is a separate action from marking read, an alert can be read but not dismissed, or (less often) dismissed without ever having been marked read.

Filtering and searching

Above the table, a filter bar gives you three ways to narrow the list:

• A search box (placeholder "Search notifications...") that matches against the notification's title and body text as you type.
• A state dropdown with five options: "All states (N)" showing your total count, "Unread (N)," "Read," "Scheduled (N)," and "Dismissed (N)," each count reflecting your current inbox. (Read is the one option that does not show a count next to it.)
• A category dropdown with "All categories" plus every category actually present in your notifications, each shown with its humanized label.

Filters combine: searching for a keyword while the state dropdown is set to "Unread" shows only unread alerts matching that keyword. If your filters produce no matches, the table is replaced with "No notifications match these filters" and a prompt to clear the search or switch the state filter.

Taking action on a notification

Each row carries up to three icon buttons on the right, and which ones appear depends on the row's state:

1. 1Mark as read (a checkmark icon) appears only on unread rows. Click it and the row flips to Read immediately in the table; the change is saved in the background.
2. 2Open (an arrow icon) appears on any row that has a destination link, for example a decision, a certification, or a document. It takes you straight to that record. This is the same click you get from clicking the notification's title.
3. 3Dismiss (an X icon) appears on any row that has not already been dismissed. Click it and the row is marked dismissed immediately; the dismissed timestamp is saved in the background.

Both mark-as-read and dismiss update the table the instant you click, before the save round-trip finishes, so the inbox never feels like it is waiting on you.

Scheduled notifications

Some alerts are created ahead of time and held until a future moment, for example a reminder tied to a decision deadline or a renewal window. While a notification's scheduled time is still ahead of you, it carries the Scheduled pill and stays out of your sidebar bell entirely, the bell only ever shows notifications whose time has already arrived. The Notifications tab is where you can see what is coming before it lands. Once the scheduled time passes, the alert delivers through whatever channel it was set up for and behaves like any other notification from then on.

How this differs from the bell

The bell icon in your sidebar is a live, short list: it shows only your most recent unread, non-dismissed, already-fired, in-app notifications (capped at ten), plus a "Mark all as read" action that clears everything the bell currently holds. The Notifications tab is the complete record. It includes read notifications, dismissed notifications, notifications still scheduled for later, and email-only notifications that never appear in the bell at all, since those are meant for your inbox rather than in-app. If you want to confirm something Verinode emailed you actually exists on file, or to look back at an alert you cleared weeks ago, this tab, not the bell, is where to check.

Empty states

No notifications at all. If Verinode has not sent you anything yet, the tab reads:

"Notifications appear as Verinode flags things worth your attention"

with three examples of what will start showing up:

• "Decision reminders fire when a step is due"
• "Survey responses ping you when a teammate replies"
• "Scheduled emails queue here before they go out"

Below that, the same "Get started" guidance shown across My Vault appears: dropping files onto the page, or setting up auto-forwarding under Connect. Neither of those is really how notifications get generated, notifications come from your own activity in Verinode (decisions, certifications, surveys, ingestion) rather than from a document you upload, so an empty Notifications tab usually just means you have not yet started using the parts of the product that raise alerts.

Filters with no matches. If you have notifications but your current search or filter selection matches none of them, the table is replaced with "No notifications match these filters" and a note to try clearing the search or switching the state filter.

Best-practice example

Say your Notifications tile on Vault home reads "3, Unread · 1 Scheduled." Open it and sort mentally by what needs you now: the three unread rows might be a Decision Step reminder that a supplement deadline is close, a Cert Renewal notice, and a Survey Low Rating flag from a teammate's review. Open each by clicking its title, which drops you straight into the decision, the certification record, or the survey response, so you can act from the Decision Workspace or wherever the link lands. Once you have acted (or decided an alert does not need action), dismiss it so your inbox reflects only what is still open. The one Scheduled row, say a reminder timed to fire closer to a deadline, needs nothing from you yet, it will surface on its own when its time comes.

Data sources