By default, a lot of things in your business can trigger an email: a new booking, a cancellation, a payment succeeding, a refund going out. Left entirely on, that's a steady trickle of email all day; turned off entirely, you miss the one notification that actually needed a same-minute reaction. The right answer isn't "all on" or "all off" -- it's matching each notification to how urgently you personally need to know about it.
Start from "would I want to know about this in the next five minutes?"
That's the real test for whether something deserves to interrupt you immediately, rather than just whether it's "important" in a general sense. A new booking is important, but for most businesses it isn't urgent -- you'll see it on your calendar whenever you next check it, and an email the moment it happens adds anxiety without adding anything you can act on sooner. A cancellation with very little notice, on the other hand, genuinely might change what you do in the next hour, especially if it opens up a slot you could fill.
Where this actually matters: solo vs. team
If you're running the business solo, you're probably checking your own calendar constantly anyway -- email notifications for bookings are often pure redundancy, telling you something you were about to see regardless. The calculation changes with a team: a manager who isn't glued to the calendar all day genuinely benefits from being told when something needs their attention (a cancellation that needs rebooking, a payment that failed), since they're not otherwise watching for it.
In ScheduloApp, notification preferences (Settings > Notifications) are per-business, not per-event-forced -- you choose which categories (new bookings, cancellations, payments) actually reach your inbox, independent of what the client-facing side still sends automatically (a client always gets their own booking confirmation regardless of what you've turned on for yourself -- this setting only controls what you see, not what the client experiences).
A sensible default, and when to deviate from it
- New bookings: often fine to turn off if you check your calendar daily anyway; worth keeping on if you have staff who need to know in near-real-time, or if you're away from the dashboard for long stretches.
- Cancellations: usually worth keeping on regardless of business size -- this is the one category where a same-day reaction (trying to refill the slot, or just knowing it happened) tends to matter more than the others.
- Payments and refunds: worth keeping on if you're the one reconciling finances yourself; less critical if someone else handles that specifically and checks it on their own schedule.
The real cost of getting this wrong in either direction
Too many notifications doesn't just clutter an inbox -- it trains you to skim past everything from the business, including the one email that genuinely needed attention, because it looks identical to the forty routine ones before it. Too few, and you miss something that would've been a quick, easy fix if you'd known about it an hour earlier instead of a day later.
If you've never looked at this setting, it's worth five minutes now rather than discovering the wrong default the hard way -- either by missing a cancellation you could have refilled, or by muting your own business's emails entirely out of habit after too many unimportant ones.