Messages — Inbox

Open this screen in Saral/hr/messages?tab=inbox

Where the office answers workers. A conversation is always between ONE worker and the office — never worker to worker, no groups, no broadcast replies — on a topic from your list (pay query, timesheet, leave, documents, site issue, welfare, other). Every message is attributed and kept as written; a mistake is corrected with a new entry, never edited away; nothing is deleted, a thread is only closed. Holders of the answering permission see the workers in their own HR scope; a confidential topic is seen only by the people named for it.

You enter

Your reply — typed, from a template, or edited from a suggested draft — and, when attachments are on, a photo or PDF.
A new conversation with a worker: the worker, the topic, a subject and the first message (when the account lets the office start one).
Close or reopen a thread; a correction to one of the office's own earlier messages.

Saral fills in

Which threads you see: the answering permission, your HR scope (a site manager sees their own workers) and, for a confidential topic, the confidential permission — decided on the server for every row.
The status (open, waiting on office, waiting on worker, closed), who spoke last, the unread marker and the reply-due time from the topic's target hours.
Who is told: the worker on your reply (bell, push and email per their preferences, held in quiet hours); the office people who may see the thread on theirs.
Auto-close after the account's silence window when the office spoke last — never while a worker is waiting on a reply.

It produces

An immutable, attributed record of every conversation, included in the worker's subject-access export, blanked on erasure, and retained six years from the later of closing and leaving (report mode by default).

What this is — and what it is not

The owner's words: no two-way chat, because chat becomes "he said, she said"; but a controlled two-way message — a worker to management, a manager to the worker — is handy. So a conversation is one worker and the office, on a topic, with a status, and every message is attributed, timestamped and immutable. The answer to "he said, she said" is not hiding the record; it is a record nobody can change. There are no groups, no worker-to-worker threads, and notices stay one-way on the Write and Sent tabs.

Who sees what

Opening the inbox needs the answering permission (conversations.answer by default — the account may name batch-email senders or worker editors instead). Within it you see the workers in your HR scope: a site manager their sites' workers, a crew seat its crew, HR everyone. A topic marked confidential (welfare, by default) is seen only by holders of the confidential permission (conversations.confidential; HR Manager, Owner and Admin by default): to anyone else the thread does not exist — not listed, not counted, not notified. The worker sees only their own threads.

The worker's side

On their phone the worker opens Messages, taps Message the office, picks what it is about, gives it a short title and writes. A confidential topic tells them who will see it. Their reply box stays open on every thread; replying to a closed thread reopens it. Query a timesheet on their Timesheets page opens the composer on the Timesheet topic. Their strings are translated into the portal's ten languages.

Replies, templates and the suggested draft

Reply templates are the account's own words, set in HR → Settings → Conversations, optionally tied to a topic. Suggest a reply offers a template for the thread's topic first; only when the account has switched on AI suggestions, and no template fits, does it ask the model for a draft from the thread's own words — and even then the draft lands in your reply box for you to read and change. Nothing is ever sent on its own.

Status, targets and closing

A worker's message puts the thread on Waiting on office; yours puts it on Waiting on worker. Each topic carries target hours for a first reply, shown as a due time and an overdue marker — information, never a block. A thread the office answered last closes itself after the account's silence window (14 days by default; 0 = never); a thread waiting on the office never closes on its own. Either side reopens a thread by writing on it.

Where the settings live

HR → Settings → Conversations owns all of it: on/off, who may start (both, workers only, office only), which permission answers, where confidential topics go, the topic list with targets, attachments, quiet hours for pushes to workers, the auto-close window, the reply templates and the AI suggestion switch. The keys themselves are set on roles in Settings → User Permissions.

Next screen: /hr/leaves

Not what you needed? Inside Saral, ask Kuku (Alt+K) — if it cannot answer, “Ask a human” sends the question to Saral support with the chat attached.