Notifications, inbox and settings

The launchpad does more than start apps. It tells you when something needs your attention, gives you a place to approve requests, and lets you adjust how values are shown. These features look minor, but the last one in particular has caught out many testers.

Notifications

The bell icon in the shell bar shows notifications: short messages such as "Purchase requisition 10004567 is waiting for your approval" or "Sales order 12345 has a delivery block." Many notifications offer quick actions such as approve or reject, and selecting the notification opens the related app. Your administrators decide which notification types your role receives.

My Inbox

Approvals in S/4HANA often run through workflows. When a workflow needs a decision from you, a task appears in My Inbox, an app for reviewing and acting on workflow tasks. At Contoso, a purchase requisition for more than $25,000 of copper for plant 1720 waits in the plant manager’s My Inbox until she approves it. You can open the task, review the document, add a comment and approve or reject.

Requester creates documentPurchase requisition for plant 1720, value above threshold.
Workflow startsThe system finds the approver from configured rules.
Task in My InboxThe approver also receives a notification.
Approve or rejectWith a comment; the decision is logged.
Document releasedPurchasing can convert it into a purchase order.

A typical approval as seen through notifications and My Inbox.

User settings

Open the user actions menu and choose Settings. The entries depend on your release and configuration, but commonly include:

User Account: your name, e-mail and user ID.
Appearance: the visual theme and display density.
Language & Region: the logon language and how dates, times and numbers are formatted.
Default Values: starting values for common fields, such as company code 1710 or plant 1710, that apps use to prefill filters and entries.
Notifications and search preferences.

Formats change your evidence

Here is the trap. The same value can be displayed differently depending on your settings. A US-formatted user sees 1,200.00 and 10/16/2026. A colleague in Germany may see 1.200,00 and 16.10.2026. Both are correct displays of the same data, but when evidence is read later, "1.200" can be misread as one point two. Time zones can also shift the displayed time of a posting.

Setting	US user	German user	Risk in evidence
Number format	1,200.00	1.200,00	Decimal and thousands separators swapped
Date format	10/16/2026	16.10.2026	Day and month confused for early-month dates
Time zone	Eastern Time	Central European Time	A posting time appears six hours apart

The same data shown with different user formats

What would you do?

A tester in Contoso’s German shared-service center reports that an invoice amount is "1.200" while the US tester recorded "1,200.00" for the same document. Is there a defect?

Key points