Actions: the work to be done
The Actions inbox lists the things somebody has to do, with the object they act on, the reason they exist and who is holding them. Open it from Actions in the menu and empty it by closing each row with a gesture that stays on the record. It is not a list of news: it is the work queue.
Why it is not a notification
“Dependency-Track synchronisation completed” is news: you read it and forget it. “Review three new matches” is an action: it has an owner, an object, often a deadline, and it ends in a recorded decision. Two different things, kept in two different places.
Keeping them together looks convenient and is not: the second gets lost inside the first, and that is the most common way of missing a 24-hour deadline without anyone having done anything wrong. News stays in Notifications; this page holds only what needs a gesture.
An action always says “somebody must assess whether the duty applies”, never “the duty applies”. The verdict comes out of triage, with a person answering the questions; the queue leads to the work, it does not conclude it.
Where they come from
Actions are not created by hand. They arrive by three routes, and none of the three writes a value on your behalf:
The same work is never duplicated: while a condition persists, the action representing it stays a single row and is updated in place. Different thresholds stay different warnings — “90 days left” and “30 days left” are two things to know, not the same thing said twice.
Exercise data and archived products never enter the queue.
The deadline comes from the case, not from the action
When an action is attached to a case, the legal deadline of that case is shown beside it. That deadline is not stored on the action: it is read from the engine every time you open the page. If somebody corrects the moment of awareness, the deadline shown here changes with it, because it is always the same single value — the one on the case.
When an action is not attached to a case, no deadline is shown. None is invented as an “operational” reminder: on screen an invented deadline would be indistinguishable from a legal one, and the difference between the two is exactly what matters. If you want an internal target date, use assignment and your own team tooling.
In practice. The number to look at to know how much time is left is always the one on the case page (Phases and deadlines). The action queue repeats it for convenience; it does not decide it.
Priority and states
Priority orders the queue: critical is reserved for what genuinely has a clock running, then high, normal, low. The states say where the work stands, not whether you are compliant:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Open | Nobody has picked it up yet. |
| In review | Somebody is working on it. |
| Waiting for supplier / owner / evidence | Blocked on somebody specific. A “waiting” that does not name who is being waited for is the box where things sit for months. |
| Completed | The work was done. |
| Dismissed | It was decided that it should not be done, and the why is written down. |
Closing an action
An action leaves the queue in three ways, and the three are never conflated:
- Completed. The work was done. Your identity is required: who completed it, and when, stays on the record.
- Dismissed, with a mandatory reason. You decide there was nothing to do. The reason field is not optional and will not take a single word. An action dismissed without a reason, read back a year later by an authority, is indistinguishable from an action that was forgotten — and the difference between the two is the difference between diligence and negligence.
- Lapsed. The observed condition is gone: the bill of materials arrived, the role was confirmed elsewhere. Here the system withdraws a proposal of its own, and only for what it opened itself and nobody has picked up. As soon as a person assigns it or takes it into review, that action is theirs and they close it.
A closed action can be reopened, and that too requires a reason. The previous version is not erased: it stays in the history, next to the new one.
Every assignment, state change, completion, dismissal and reopening leaves a line in the activity registry, with the author and the instant. That is why the reason is mandatory: it is for whoever reads it back, not for whoever writes it.
Assigning and picking up
An action with no assignee belongs to everyone and therefore to no one. From the queue you filter by assigned to me, unassigned or all; from the detail page you assign it to a person or take it yourself. Assigning is a gesture too: who assigned is recorded alongside who was assigned.
The numbers at the top
Above the queue there are counts — open, critical, to review, waiting, unassigned. They are counts, not a score: each one can be recounted by hand from the list, and none of them draws a conclusion about your legal position under the CRA. There is no compliance percentage in CRAnotify, here or anywhere else.