Action Items

For Admins

Action Items is one place for everything in Bonusly that is waiting on your decision award and incentive approval requests, reward redemptions, team change requests, external recognition submissions, reported recognition posts, and cards waiting for your signature.

It has two halves:

Action Items replaces the separate messages Bonusly used to send for each of these events. Instead of one email per approval request, one for pending rewards, and one for team changes, you get a single message that lists all of them together. If you used to receive those individual notices and no longer do, this is why.

You do not need to be an admin to use Action Items. Anyone assigned as an approver on an award or incentive approval step receives the email and sees the page, whether or not they hold any admin permission.

Everyone in that list sees only the sections they can actually act on.

The email goes out on weekdays only (Monday through Friday), after 4:00 PM in your own time zone. Someone in London and someone in Denver each get theirs at their own local end of day.

You receive at most one per day, and only when there is something in it. If nothing is waiting on you when your 4:00 PM comes around, no email is sent an empty round-up is never delivered.

Each section lists up to five items, followed by a line telling you how many more are waiting and a button that opens the full list. The set-up issues section is the exception: it lists every affected award, because each one is silently blocking requests until it is fixed.

Award and incentive request rows carry Approve and Deny buttons that record your decision without a separate sign-in step. You land on a confirmation page that reads "Approved" or "Denied".

Those buttons stay valid for 7 days from the day the email was sent. After that the page reads "Link expired" and points you to your pending approvals, where the request is still waiting.

You may also see one of these instead:

There are three ways in:

Two tabs sit at the top of the page:

When Open Items is empty, you see "You're all caught up!" rather than a stack of empty sections. When Historical Items is empty nothing has been decided yet it simply says so.

When you arrive from the Action Items email, a card at the top of Open Items lists what has already been decided since that email went out: "3 items have already been handled today." Each row shows the date, the type of item, what it was, the decision, and who made it.

This matters most on a shared queue. If you and two other admins all received the same email, this card is how you see that a colleague already handled something before you open it.

The card covers up to 7 days. If you follow an older link, it shows the last 7 days of activity and notes that your link came from an older email. Dismiss removes the card for that visit; following the email link again brings it back.

Turning the email off does not remove the Action Items page or the avatar-menu entry. Work still collects there; you simply stop being told about it by email.

This setting is personal. Turning it off for yourself does not change what anyone else at your company receives.

I am an approver but not an admin. Will I get the email? Yes. Being named on an approval step is enough no admin permission is required. The Action Items setting appears in your own Notifications page too, so you can turn it off if you prefer.

I did not get an email today. Is something broken? Most likely nothing was waiting on you at 4:00 PM your time. The email is also weekdays-only, so there is no Saturday or Sunday send, and it goes out at most once per day. If you expected one and had work waiting, check that Action Items is still enabled in your Notifications page.

Why does my email look different from my colleague's? Each email is built for its recipient. You see only the sections you have permission to act on, so a Rewards admin and a Global admin at the same company receive genuinely different messages.

Can I get it more or less often? No. There is no cadence setting on or off. The page is always available regardless.

The email says an award is waiting, but the page shows nothing. Someone else on the same approval step decided it after the email was sent. Switch to Historical Items to see the decision and who made it.

What is a "Setup issue"? An award whose approval process has a step with no active approvers -- usually because the approver's Bonusly account was deactivated. Requests routed through that step cannot be approved by anyone until you add an approver or switch the award to approve automatically.

Questions? Send us a note to [email protected], we'd be happy to help.