🔔 Notification Widget (Online)

The notification bell in the AutoDrive Online top bar is your inbox for things that actually need a response. It is intentionally narrow — not every event in your account shows up there, only the ones that need your acknowledgment or decision. The bell only appears when there is something to show, so an empty inbox means an empty top bar.

Open it by clicking the bell. A small dropdown panel anchors below the bell with everything currently outstanding. A red badge on the bell tells you how many of those items you have not opened yet; clicking Mark all read at the top of the panel clears the badge without dismissing the items themselves.

What the bell shows

• Geofence events to acknowledge. When a driver enters, exits, or dwells in one of your LiveDrive zones, you get a row in the bell. Repeated events from the same driver and zone on the same day are rolled into one row, with a count, so a driver who exits the warehouse five times in a shift is one notification, not five. Click Acknowledge to mark every event in that bucket as reviewed.
• Invites waiting for you. If another account owner invited you into their group as an admin or driver, the invite lands here with an Accept button. We do not have a built-in “decline” — you can either accept or let the invite expire on its own. If you do not want to see it in the bell, the Dismiss button hides it from your widget without affecting the invite on the sender's side.
• Billing and subscription warnings. Payment failures, trial-ending notices, and lapsed subscriptions all surface in the bell with a direct link to manage subscription. Expired and Payment Failed rows are pinned to the top and cannot be dismissed — the only way to clear them is to resolve the billing issue itself.
• Drivers awaiting LiveDrive consent. When you enable LiveDrive for a driver, they have to accept consent on their device before their position broadcasts. The bell rolls every still-pending driver into one row so you can nudge them or revoke if needed.
• Announcements from the AutoDrive team. Occasional product news — new features, capacity changes, planned maintenance — lands in your bell with a Read more link. These never block anything; you can dismiss them once you have read them.

Tabs at the top of the panel

The panel splits items into three tabs:

• All — every current item.
• Needs Action — the subset that has a button to click (Acknowledge, Accept, Manage subscription, etc.). Use this when you are catching up and only want to see things that require a decision.
• Informational — items where there is nothing to do, just to read. Announcements and finished background jobs land here.

Who sees it

The notification widget is primarily a tool for account owners and admins. Drivers and regular members see a subset of items that affect them personally — invites addressed to their email, for example — but not fleet-wide things like geofence acknowledgments or billing warnings, since those are not theirs to action.

Behavior details

• The panel polls for new items every minute while you have the AutoDrive Online tab focused, and every five minutes when the tab is in the background. New items appear without you needing to refresh.
• Pressing Esc or clicking outside the panel closes it. The badge state is preserved.
• Pinned rows (currently only expired / payment-failed subscriptions) stay at the top and cannot be dismissed. Everything else is dismissible after you have handled it.
• Dismissal is per-device for the dismisser only — if you dismiss something on your laptop, your phone (if you ever add the widget there) would still show it. Acknowledgment is global — once you acknowledge a geofence event, it is acknowledged everywhere.

The widget is intentionally web-only for now. We have not wired it up to OS-level Notification Center on macOS, and the iPhone and Android apps continue to use their existing per-feature push notifications.