The bell sits in the top-right of the header, next to your profile picture (on a phone, next to the person icon that opens Account), whenever a yacht is open. Its tooltip reads Notifications and alerts. Clicking it opens the Notifications and Alerts page; while you are on that page the bell stays highlighted.
Who sees it
The bell appears only inside a yacht, and only for people acting in a vessel role on it — captains, crew and viewers. On the company-level pages, before you have opened a vessel, there is no bell at all, and an owner does not get one.
A company office user who opens a yacht sees the bell too, because opening a vessel puts them in a vessel role for the duration. Their page is the notifications feed on its own without the alert cards, so their badge counts unread notifications only.
What the number means
The badge is a single total of two things added together:
- every one of your alerts, counting each alert's own figure rather than the number of rows — a row reading 3 · Expiring Certificates contributes 3
- your unread notifications for this yacht
If the total is zero, no badge is shown. Above 99 it displays as 99+.
Because it mixes the two, the badge going down does not tell you which half changed. Marking notifications read lowers it; so does uploading the missing document behind an alert.
Why yours differs from a colleague's
The badge is personal and per yacht. It counts your own records and the tasks assigned to you, never the crew's as a whole, and it is rebuilt from scratch when you switch to another vessel. Areas the yacht is not licensed for, and areas you are not permitted to see, contribute nothing to it.
For the whole-vessel equivalent, look at the Alerts widget on the Dashboard.