Notification Scheduling

Understanding how Attendara schedules and dispatches notifications helps you set the right offsets and troubleshoot timing issues.

How scheduling works

When an appointment is created or updated, Attendara calculates the send time for each active notification rule:

1. The trigger event is identified (e.g. "appointment created at 10:00 AM").
2. The offset is applied (e.g. "send 24 hours before the start time").
3. The resulting send time is stored as a scheduled notification.
4. A background job runs every few minutes, finds notifications due to be sent, and dispatches them.

This means notifications can be queued days or weeks in advance and will be sent at exactly the right time.

Timezone handling

All notification times are calculated in the timezone you configured in your Company Profile. For example, if your timezone is Europe/London and a rule fires "24 hours before the start", the notification is sent at the same clock time the day before, accounting for daylight saving changes.

When notifications are not sent

A queued notification is not sent if, at the time of dispatch:

• The appointment has been cancelled (the event was deleted from your calendar).
• The rule has been deactivated.
• The customer has opted out of communications.
• The rule has Skip if already confirmed enabled and the customer has confirmed.
• The appointment was rescheduled after the notification was queued — Attendara reschedules or cancels the notification based on the new time.

Immediate notifications (After creation / After reschedule)

Rules with an After creation or After reschedule trigger and an offset of 0 are sent immediately when the event is detected. In practice, this means within a few minutes of you creating the calendar event, the customer receives their confirmation email.

Checking notification status

The full communication history for any appointment is accessible through the customer profile. Go to Customers, open the relevant customer, and expand the appointment row. Under Communication history, each notification entry can itself be expanded to show:

• Medium — Whether the notification was sent by email or SMS.
• Subject — The email subject line (email notifications only).
• Timestamp — When the notification was dispatched.
• Status — Whether delivery was successful or failed.
• Error details — The reason for failure, if applicable.
• Message body — The full content of the notification as sent.

Retry on failure

If a notification fails to send, the failure is recorded in the communication history with the error details. Check the Event Log under the main navigation for a consolidated view of delivery errors across all customers.