Connect Foreman and your team chat

Foreman does not send notifications. That is a decision, not an oversight. "No push notifications, no in-app inbox" is written into the product definition as something we deliberately do not build, and every feature spec repeats it: no alert when a diary entry lands, no nudge when a task stalls, no reminder that the weekly toolbox talk has not been filled in.

That is the right call for a small builder. Nobody wants a fifth app buzzing at them, and a notification settings screen is a thing you configure once and then ignore.

But the need underneath it is real. You still want to know that nobody logged the diary at Kingsley Street today.

Connect your team chat and the assistant becomes that layer instead.

Practical ways to use Foreman and your team chat

Chase the diary that did not get logged.

"At 5pm, check every active project for a diary entry dated today. For any site missing one, WhatsApp the site manager by name and ask how the day went."

This is the one worth setting up first. Foreman knows which sites have an entry and which do not. What it cannot do is tell anybody. WhatsApp can.

Note what it is actually checking. Foreman has no clock-on or attendance feature, so this is not "who is on site". It is "which site has no diary entry for today". For a small builder those turn out to be close enough to the same question, because the diary is the thing that proves the day happened.

Send each site manager a personal knock-off summary.

"Every weekday at 4:30, message each site manager privately with their own open tasks, anything due tomorrow, and whether their diary is in yet. Keep it short and use their first name."

One message per person, containing only their sites. This is the part a built-in notification cannot do, because it is a broadcast and this is a briefing.

Push the morning list into the group.

"Post to #site-crew each morning: what is on at each job today, who is assigned, and any task that went overdue yesterday."

Escalate when something looks wrong.

"If a diary entry mentions an incident, injury, near miss or damage, message me directly straight away with the site, who wrote it and what it says."

Diary entries are free text, so the assistant is reading them rather than pattern-matching a field. Nobody has to remember to tick a box for this to fire.

Nudge the toolbox talk nobody filled in.

"It is Friday. Which sites have no toolbox talk submission this week? Message those site managers."

Recurring forms and reminders are explicitly out of scope in Foreman's forms spec. This is how you get them without us building a scheduler.

Welcome a subbie the moment he inducts.

"When someone new completes an induction at Beach House, WhatsApp them the gate code, the site manager's number and what time we start."

The induction register records the completion. The project record holds the gate code. Neither of them can send a text.

Answer the question in the channel.

"Who was at Pacific Avenue on the 14th?"

Asked in Slack, answered from the diary, without anyone opening Foreman.

What to connect

Slack is the easiest by a distance. Slack built this themselves, it has been available since February 2026, and there is nothing to install. If your crew is already in Slack, start here.

WhatsApp is what most Australian site crews actually use, and it is the more awkward one. WhatsApp have not built this themselves, so you use something made by someone else. Two things follow from that, and both are worth knowing now rather than later. Messages come from your own number, so the crew sees them from you. And it needs a computer left switched on to do the sending, because a laptop that goes to sleep at night will not send your 5pm message. An old machine in the office is plenty. This is the setup people most often ask us for a hand with.

Microsoft Teams works, though Microsoft are still finishing their version of it. Usable now, likely to get better.

Email needs no explanation and is the fallback that always works.

The part that does the scheduling

None of this comes from Foreman. We answer questions when something asks us. We have no clock, and we send nothing.

The timing lives with the assistant. Claude lets you set up a routine that runs at a time you choose, and that is the whole mechanism. At 4:30 each weekday it wakes up, reads your diaries and tasks out of Foreman, works out who is missing what, writes a different message for each person, and sends them through WhatsApp.

You set that up by writing what you want it to do, in a sentence, the same way you would tell a person. There is no code involved anywhere in this.

One small thing that matters more than it looks. Foreman works out what "today" means from the timezone set in your business profile. Check that it is right before you rely on a daily message, or anything running late at night will ask about the wrong day.

You also need Foreman connected from API and integrations. That connection sees your whole account rather than one job, which is exactly what lets a single routine cover every site you have got running.

Why this beats a notifications feature

A built-in notification is a rule someone wrote in advance, for everyone, out of a settings screen. You get the events we thought to offer, phrased the way we phrased them.

This is a rule you write in a sentence, and it can be as specific as you like. Only Kingsley Street. Only when Dave has not logged by five. Different wording for the bloke who reads everything and the one who does not. Weekly to the head contractor, daily to you.

It also reads across systems. A notification built into Foreman can only ever tell you about Foreman. A routine holding both Foreman and your chat can bring the weather in when it explains the delay, or your accounts when the question is whether an invoice matches the days on site.

The honest trade is that this needs a routine set up once, and a built-in alert needs a checkbox. If you want alerts nobody configures, we do not do that. If you want the site to tell you what went wrong before you find out on Monday, this is better than the checkbox ever was.

Related

Connect Foreman and Xero covers the money side of the same idea, and how to keep a site diary covers writing the entry all of this reads from.