Notification policies

Where

Notifications → Notification policies

Plan

Growth and above

Permission

Organization → Notification Receiver

A policy is the organisation’s setting for one kind of notification on one channel. It decides what happens for staff who have not made their own choice — and, if you lock it, for everyone regardless of their choice.

The screen says so at the top: “Policies apply organisation-wide. Locked policies override individual users’ choices; critical notifications are always delivered.”

How to create a policy

1. Go to Notifications → Notification policies.
2. Click New policy.
3. Pick a Category — System, Security, Billing, Sales, Purchasing, Inventory, Finance, HR, Marketing or Reminders.
4. Pick a Channel — In-app, Push, Email, SMS or WhatsApp.
5. To cover the whole category, leave Target a specific notification type off. To cover one notification, turn it on and choose the Notification type.
6. Set Deliver this notification on or off.
7. Decide whether to turn on Lock (users cannot override).
8. Click Save.

Each policy then appears as a card reading, for example, “Sales · Email”, with a green Deliver or grey Suppress badge and a padlock if it is locked.

Locked versus unlocked

This is the whole point of the screen, and the difference matters:

	Effect
Unlocked	A default. It applies to staff who have not set that switch themselves. Anyone who has made their own choice keeps it.
Locked	Your setting wins over everyone’s own choice, for that notification and channel.

A locked policy does not grey out the user’s switch

On their own preferences screen the chip shows a padlock and the tooltip “Locked by your administrator” — but a locked policy does not remove the setting from view, it overrides what it is set to. Staff can see exactly what you have decided and why.

What a policy cannot do

Critical notifications ignore policies entirely

You can create a policy that suppresses a security alert, a one-time code or a billing-enforcement warning. It will save, and the card will look completely normal with a grey Suppress badge.

It will have no effect. Those messages are always delivered. Nothing on the screen warns you.

A policy always applies to everyone. There is no way to target a role, a person, a company or a branch — the app refuses anything narrower. If you need different rules for the shop floor and the office, you cannot express that here.

There is no scheduling, batching or rate limiting. No “daily digest”, no “at most one an hour”, no quiet hours at the organisation level. Those controls simply do not exist on this screen — quiet hours are a personal setting only.

A cosmetic wrinkle

A policy aimed at a single notification shows its internal name on the card — for instance sales.order_placed rather than the friendly description you picked it by in the dropdown. It is the right policy; only the label is unhelpful.

Who can see this

The menu entry needs the Growth plan and the notification-receiver permission. Without the permission it is hidden; on a lower plan it is hidden and a direct link sends you Home.

Someone who can see the screen but lacks the permission gets a read-only view — the New, Edit and Delete buttons are not drawn.

Related

• Your notification preferences — the per-person version
• Alert recipients — where business alerts go