The two halves of the Notifications and Alerts page look similar — both are short lists of things wanting your attention — but they work in opposite ways.
An alert is a state, not a message
An alert is a count, recalculated every time you open the page. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent, and there is no way to dismiss one. Expired Certificates · 2 simply means that right now two of your certificates carry a date in the past.
The consequence: you clear an alert by fixing the record, not by acknowledging it. Upload the renewed certificate and the row is gone the next time the counts are fetched. The red Resolve actions to clear these line under the Critical Alerts heading says exactly this.
Because the number is recomputed rather than remembered, an alert can also reappear on its own — a certificate that enters its expiry window raises Expiring Certificates without anything happening in the app that day.
A notification is a message, and it is kept
A notification is a single message created at a moment in time and addressed to you: someone assigned you a task, a document expired last night. It is stored, it counts as unread until you mark it read, and it stays in your feed as a record afterwards. Marking it read is only about the message — it changes nothing about the task or the document.
That means the two can disagree, and correctly so. You can mark an assigned you a task message as read and still see Open Tasks · 1 in the yellow card, because the task is still open. Equally, the alert clears once the task is done, while the old message stays in your feed as a record of what happened.
Notifications also do not nag. A single event produces a single message, and an unresolved problem is not re-announced night after night — so an empty feed never means everything is in order. The alert cards are the ones that answer that.
Where each alert is explained
The alert cards only count; they do not own the rules. What makes a certificate count as expiring, what makes a task overdue, or when a month of work and rest hours counts as unsigned is decided by the area that owns those records. Almost every alert is a link straight to that list, already filtered; read the section for that area for the rules behind the number:
- passports, crew certificates, medical certificates and your personal details — Crew, and Your Account Page and Personal Details
- crew form categories, and forms waiting on your signature — Crew forms
- controlled documents you still need to read and sign — SMS
- Tasks for its open and overdue counts, and Maintenance for its open, overdue and critical counts
- Work/Rest Hours for unsigned months and incomplete days
- Risk Manager for overdue reviews, reviews due, changes requested and incomplete assessments
Totals and subsets overlap on purpose
Where an area reports both an Open Tasks and an Overdue Tasks count, every overdue task is also counted as open. The two rows describe the same pile from two angles — the second is a subset of the first, not a separate group. Critical Tasks under Maintenance works the same way: it narrows the open tasks rather than standing beside them. Under SMS, Documents to Read gives your overall total while each Unread … row breaks that same total down by category. Never add these figures together, and never subtract one from another to work out "how many are merely open"; that is not a number the app reports.