Communications

Operations → Communications

Every SMS, email and push notification the platform sends lands in one ledger. That is what makes "did the tenant actually get their invoice?" a question with an answer.

The overview console

Communications → Overview answers the three questions a manager actually asks, over the period and property you have selected: how much went out, how much of it landed, and what came back.

Below the tiles, always open: volume over time and where messages ended up. The rest — why messages did not land and which addresses keep failing, what you send most of, what residents are writing back about, and how sentiment moves period on period — is folded, each behind a heading that carries its own headline figure. Click a tile to open the section that explains it, or click any heading to open it yourself.

Choosing which channels residents are reached on

Settings → Communication Channels decides whether residents are reached by email, SMS or WhatsApp. You can set it for the whole organisation, or differently for one property — a property that sets nothing follows the organisation, and an organisation that sets nothing gets the platform default of email and WhatsApp.

Each channel is use, do not use, or inherit, and you can add exceptions for particular kinds of message — for example, sending payment confirmations by SMS even where SMS is otherwise off.

This policy is what the send dialog offers you. A channel the policy disallows is not shown, and if one is disallowed for a particular message type, that message is recorded as skipped rather than sent.

Sending to the rows you picked

When you tick rows and choose Send, the send is locked to that selection, and the dialog says so — the date-range and lease pickers disappear, because they could only widen it. Opening the dialog without a selection warns you that it will reach the whole property.

The review step states, in words, how many items the send resolved to before you submit, and flags it if that number is larger than what you picked. If you do want to widen it, ignore my selection reopens the dialog unscoped — it never widens silently.

The message preferences page

Every email carries a link to a public message preferences page. It needs no sign-in, because the person opening it is very often not your tenant — they have been receiving rent reminders for a stranger after a digit was mistyped.

The page names the address back to the reader and offers three answers:

All three stop messaging to that address immediately, and all three raise a contact report for staff to work. The distinction matters: the first says your record is wrong, the other two say your record is right but you are sending too much.

Stopping some messages without stopping all of them

Most people who write in are not asking to be cut off. They are asking for less of one thing — "stop sending me reminders", "the email is enough, not WhatsApp too". Reading any of those as a total stop would cut a paying tenant off from their own invoices, so the page lets them say which kind they mean:

A narrowed preference applies to that address on that channel and leaves everything else running, so a tenant who switches off reminders still receives their invoice. On the Contact reports console the case says which kinds were stopped, so you can see the difference between "stop everything" and "stop the reminders".

Contact reports

When somebody tells us we have the wrong number, messaging to that contact stops immediately, before anyone looks at it. The Contact reports console is where you then fix the tenant record.

They can tell us in any of these ways, and all of them arrive in the same queue:

What the reporter is told

They are answered straight away, on the channel they used, so that being ignored is not what they experience while the case waits for you:

Thanks for letting us know. We have stopped messaging you and our team is checking the records. You will not hear from us again unless you ask us to.

The reply is sent once per report. A provider that redelivers the same inbound message, or a person who writes twice, does not get apologised to twice — repeating the apology to somebody complaining about too many messages would re-enact the complaint.

Working the queue

Each report shows who we were messaging, what they said, and how long it has been waiting, oldest first. Take one with I'll take this, then Review it and say what you found:

Wherever a phone number or email address appears in the app — on a resident, an owner, a vendor or a collections case — a marker beside it tells you if there is a problem: "Not sending WhatsApp and text message" means messages have stopped, and "WhatsApp may not work" means they have failed before but are still being tried. No marker means the contact is fine, or nothing has been sent to it yet.

The delivery tracker

The tracker is the operational record of outbound messaging.

Resending

Resend Selected re-queues the messages you have ticked that did not arrive — failed, rejected or undelivered. They resend within about a minute. Messages that already reached the recipient are left alone, and the confirmation tells you how many of your selection that applies to.

Statuses

Messages move through a lifecycle rather than being simply sent or not:

Diagnosing a message that never arrived

1. Find it by source

   Filter by source type and ID — the invoice, payment or case that generated it — rather than scrolling by date.

2. Read the status

   Skipped means it was never attempted. Failed means it was attempted and rejected.

3. Read the provider response

   Most failures name their cause: invalid number, unreachable handset, bounced address, blocked sender.

4. Check the recipient details

   The address used is recorded on the message. Compare it against the resident record.

5. Fix the source, not the message

   Correcting the resident's phone or email is what fixes the next hundred messages.

Where messages come from

Because everything lands in one ledger, delivery status is available to every module without each one building its own tracking.

Mailbox and chat

• Mailbox holds email conversations, with threads and archive.
• Chat carries direct messages — operator to operator, and operator to resident where enabled.

Both are conversation surfaces; the tracker is the audit surface. Use chat to talk, use the tracker to prove.

Message frequency

Automated messaging can become harassment quickly when several engines each have a reason to write to the same person. Collection strategies carry a max contacts per week guard counted across all channels, precisely for this reason. Where you add new automated messaging, check what else already writes to that audience.

Common problems