How notifications and alerts work
UniAsset is designed as an early-warning instrument. Almost every alert fires before the thing you care about happens, not after.
What UniAsset monitors
| Condition | Fires when |
|---|---|
| Maintenance due | A service record's next due date is approaching |
| Maintenance overdue | That date has passed |
| Preventive maintenance due | A PM rule enters its warning window |
| Preventive maintenance overdue | A PM rule's due date has passed |
| Document expiry | An attached document nears, then passes, its expiry date |
| Warranty expiry | An asset's warranty nears its expiry date |
| Document asset expiry | A Document Asset nears, then passes, its expiry date |
| Low stock | A stock item or consumable falls to or below its minimum threshold |
| Check-out due | A checked-out asset is approaching its expected return date |
| Check-out overdue | That date has passed |
| Work order assigned | A work order is assigned to you |
| SLA breach | A work order passes its SLA deadline |
| Escalation levels 1, 2 and 3 | A work order is not progressing |
| Usage warning | You reach 80% of a plan limit |
| Limit reached | You reach a plan limit |
Maintenance, PM, work order, SLA and escalation alerts require Orbit or above. Usage warnings go to the Owner only.
Severity
Every alert carries one of three severities:
- Informational — worth knowing
- Warning — act soon
- Critical — act now
How alerts reach you
| Channel | Plan |
|---|---|
| In-app notification centre | Nova, Orbit, Odyssey, Cosmos |
| Weekly digest email | Nova, Orbit, Odyssey, Cosmos |
| Immediate email for critical alerts | Orbit, Odyssey, Cosmos |
| Daily digest email | Orbit, Odyssey, Cosmos |
On Nova you get the in-app notification centre plus a weekly digest. Immediate and daily emails start at Orbit.
Monthly email volume is capped by plan: Orbit 500, Odyssey and Cosmos unlimited.
You control whether you receive immediate emails or digests in Settings → Preferences. See How to set your notification preferences.
One alert per condition, not one per check
UniAsset evaluates conditions on a schedule. Without protection, a forklift overdue for three weeks would generate an alert on every single run.
It does not. Each candidate alert carries a deduplication key, so a condition that has already been notified produces nothing new. A persistent problem gives you one notification, not a hundred.
That also means the evaluation is safe to re-run after a failure without spamming your team.
Read state is per person
Most alerts are organization-wide rather than addressed to one person, and are filtered by role when they are read.
Read state is tracked per user. When you dismiss an organization-wide alert, it stays visible to everyone else. Nobody can hide a problem from the rest of the team by clearing their own notification centre.
Where to see what is coming
The notification centre in the top bar shows alerts that have fired.
Upcoming gives you the forward view — everything due, in one consolidated list: maintenance, document expiry, warranty expiry and check-out returns. This is the better place to plan from, because it shows what is coming rather than what has already tripped a threshold. See The Upcoming view.
The dashboard surfaces alerts needing attention alongside overdue work.
Why warnings fire early
Every monitoring capability is designed to surface a problem before it matters:
- Document expiry warns ahead of the date
- Warranty expiry warns ahead of the date
- Preventive maintenance warns on a window you configure
- Usage warnings fire at 80% of a limit, not at 100%
This is a stance, not a UX preference. A system that tells you a certificate expired last week is a post-mortem tool. UniAsset is built to tell you before.
Common mistakes
Setting PM warning windows too short. A three-day window on a job that needs a contractor booked two weeks out gives you no useful notice. Set the window to the lead time you actually need.
Ignoring low-stock thresholds. A threshold of zero means the alert arrives when you have already run out.
Assuming email is the only channel. On Nova, immediate emails are not included. Check the in-app notification centre and the weekly digest.
Expecting an alert when an IoT signal arrives. Nothing reacts to telemetry automatically. Signals are stored and displayed; they do not raise alerts, work orders or incidents. See Understanding IoT signals.
Troubleshooting
I'm not getting any emails. Check Settings → Preferences first, then your spam folder. On Nova, only the weekly digest is sent. See Email not received.
I got one alert for something that has been overdue for weeks. That is the deduplication working as designed. Check Upcoming or the Maintenance report for the full outstanding list.
A colleague sees an alert I don't. Alerts are filtered by role when read. Usage warnings are Owner-only.
Maintenance alerts stopped after I archived an asset. Archived and disposed assets are removed from alert evaluation immediately. That is intended — a disposed asset should not keep generating maintenance alerts.
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