For you

Most products in this market have an inbox: rooms, threads, a per-job chat. Each is a channel that sits beside the record, drifts from the job it is about, and that the product’s own history does not contain.

This product takes the other position. There is no messaging. There are only notes, and a note can be addressed.

Understand what a note is here

• A note that mentions a teammate is a message to them — see Mentioning a teammate in a note.
• A note shared with the client and sent is a message to them, delivered by email or text according to what they agreed to.
• What the client texts back, or types on their own page, lands on the job as a note from them — see When a client replies.

Every one of those lives on the job it is about. Nothing drifts, because nothing left.

Open your queue

For you is one list of everything addressed to you, across every job you can see.

It is not a place to talk. There is no reply box on the queue, because replying happens on the job where the conversation belongs. The queue’s job is to make sure nothing addressed to you waits for you to happen to open the right job.

Clear it

An item leaves the queue when you have dealt with it. What is left is genuinely outstanding, which is what makes the count worth looking at.

If it is empty, nothing is waiting on you — and you can believe that, because everything that would be waiting is in one list rather than spread across jobs.

Why not an inbox

A separate chat channel has three problems this arrangement does not: it duplicates the record, it drifts from the job over time, and it does not appear in the job’s own history when somebody reads it back a year later.

Notes are the history. The queue is a view over them.