Messages allow users involved in a Job to talk to each other inside TutorCruncher, instead of swapping personal email addresses and phone numbers. Administrators, Tutors, Clients and Students can all take part.

An individual conversation is called a 'chat'. Every chat belongs to your Branch, is visible to your Administrators, and is kept as a permanent record.

The Messages list.

Messages is switched off by default. To enable Messages, head to System > Settings > Communication Settings > Messages and tick Messages enabled.

There are four more options in that section controlling which Jobs get a chat, whether Students are included, and what can be written in a message. You can read about all of them here.

There are only two kinds of chat.

You can read about Job chats here, and about starting a chat yourself here.

Administrators find Messages at Communications > Messages, and there is also a Messages link in the top navigation bar. Tutors, Clients and Students get a Messages item of their own in the main menu.

A dot appears on that link whenever any of your chats has something you have not read, and clears once you have read everything. Opening the Messages list on its own does not clear it - the list is only a directory, so you have to open the chat itself.

The unread dot on the Messages link.

The list at Communications > Messages has two tabs, each showing how many chats it holds:

Each row shows the Chat (its title, its description and a badge counting anything you have not read), the Participants, the Last message date, the Created date and the Status. Status reads Active for a chat that can still be posted in and Inactive for one that is locked or archived. Select any column heading to sort by it.

Administrators can filter the list by Created date, Unread, Status, Participant, Job, Tutor and Client. The filters narrow both tabs at once. Tutors, Clients and Students see a smaller set on their own list, because some of them would not apply.

Chats also appear in two other places for Administrators:

Open a chat from Communications > Messages and select its row. Type in the box at the bottom marked Write a message... and press Enter to send, or Shift and Enter together for a new line. A message can be up to 4,000 characters long.

Messages arrive live, so everyone with the chat open sees them without refreshing. If the live connection drops you will see a banner saying real-time messaging is temporarily unavailable - you can still send messages, you just need to refresh the page to see new ones.

The conversation is grouped into days, each with its own date divider, and the thread opens with a Chat created line. Alongside the messages you will also see short timeline notes when somebody is added to or removed from the chat, when the title or description is edited, and when an Administrator locks, unlocks, archives or unarchives it. Dates and times are shown in your own timezone.

An open chat, with the Details panel beside it.

Hover over any message and select the reply arrow. The message you are answering is quoted above your reply, and selecting that quote jumps back to the original. Press Esc to cancel a reply before sending it.

Each message you send carries a tick showing how far it has got:

Selecting the tick opens a Read by list naming who has read the message, with their role beside each name.

Select the magnifier beside the Send button to search the chat you have open. In a locked chat the magnifier sits in the bar at the bottom instead.

Type at least three characters and the matching messages are listed newest first, a page at a time. Select a result to jump straight to that message in the conversation, however far back it is. Press Esc, or select the close icon, to go back to the thread where you left it.

Select the date pill on any day divider to open the Jump to… menu. From there you can jump to Today, Yesterday, Last week, Last month, The very beginning, or Jump to a specific date and pick one from the calendar. The thread reloads around that point, and scrolling carries on in both directions from there.

On a wide screen the Details panel sits beside the conversation. On a narrower screen there is a Details button at the top of the chat instead. It shows the Related Job if the chat has one, the description, the Status dropdown for Administrators, your Email me about new messages setting, and the full list of participants. The person who started the chat is marked with a Creator chip in that list, and your own row with a You chip.

Administrators with the 'Edit Operations' permission can edit the description of any chat, and the title of any Administrator chat. Tutors in a chat can edit the description. Clients and Students cannot edit either. Nothing can be edited once a chat is locked or archived, and a Job chat always takes its title from its Job.

If you leave messages unread, TutorCruncher emails you a reminder. There is a 15 minute grace period first, so reading a message in the app straight away means no email goes out, and a 12 hour gap before the same chat can email you again. All the messages you have missed in one chat come in a single email.

To stop a particular chat emailing you, open it and untick Email me about new messages in the Details panel, or use the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email itself. This only affects your own emails - everyone else sets this for themselves.

You can customise the wording of both Messages emails - 'Added to Conversation' and the unread reminder, under System > Settings > Communication Settings > Email Definitions. Read more about Email Definitions here.

Two checks run on every message before it is sent, both controlled at System > Settings > Communication Settings > Messages and both on by default:

In both cases the sender is told why and can edit the message and try again. Nothing is saved, so a blocked message never reaches anyone.

A locked chat is read-only: the history stays visible to everyone who could see it before, but nobody can post, nobody can edit it, and the reason is shown where the message box used to be. Its Status on the Messages list reads Inactive. Nothing is lost while a chat is locked.

Three things lock a chat:

Deleting a Job also closes its chat, for as long as the Job is in the trash. Recovering the Job from System > Trash puts the chat back exactly as it was.

A locked chat shows the reason instead of a message box.

Archiving is how you put a finished conversation out of the way without losing it. Open the chat from Communications > Messages and set the Status dropdown in the Details panel to Archived. You need the 'Edit Operations' permission.

An archived chat moves to the Archived tab for everyone in it, is locked so nobody can post, and stops sending unread-message emails. It no longer lights the red unread dot either.

Setting the Status back to Open unarchives the chat and reopens it. If something else had already locked it before you archived it - the Job being Finished, say, or another Administrator - unarchiving puts it back on the Current tab still locked, exactly as it would have been had it never been archived.

Every chat has a Report a Safeguarding/Wellbeing Concern button at the top, available to all four user roles. If the chat belongs to a Job, the concern is attached to that Job automatically, and records which chat it came from. Read more about raising a concern here.

While a severe, unresolved Safeguarding/Wellbeing Concern is open against a chat, its Job, or a Tutor on that Job, the chat becomes read-only for everyone in it. Only Administrators can still post, and they see a warning above the message box telling them so. Resolving the concern restores the chat on its own - there is no unlock step.

This only applies when both Use Safeguarding/Wellbeing Concerns and the concern locking option are switched on at System > Settings > People and Activity > Safeguarding/Wellbeing Concerns.

No. Chats and messages cannot be deleted by anyone, including Administrators. Conversations are kept as a permanent record so they are available if a Safeguarding/Wellbeing Concern is raised about them later. If you need a chat to stop being used, archive it from the Status dropdown in its Details panel.

The one exception is Permanent Delete. Permanently deleting a user at System > Trash blanks everything they ever sent: their messages stay in the conversation, in place, but read Message deleted.

Yes. Any Administrator with permission to 'View Operations' can open any chat on the Branch from Communications > Messages, whether or not they are a participant.

Reading a chat as a non-participant does not change anyone's read receipts, and the people in the chat are not told. Opening a chat is not itself recorded, but creating a chat, adding and removing participants, and locking, unlocking, archiving and unarchiving one are all recorded in the Activity Log at System > Activity Log.

Not unless they were added to the chat. An Administrator can post in any chat without joining it, and their message is labelled as coming from an Administrator.

Yes. A Client sees every chat that they or any of their Students are in.

Nothing is deleted. Everybody immediately loses access to the Messages menu item and to every chat, and no emails go out. Switching it back on at System > Settings > Communication Settings > Messages restores everything exactly as it was, without a flood of catch-up emails.

Chats and their messages can be read through the API, and chat activity is sent to your Webhooks. A chat can also be locked, unlocked, archived and unarchived through the API, exactly as an Administrator would from its Details panel. Messages themselves cannot be sent through the API.