Why notification categories exist

Not every alert deserves the same urgency. A badge your child just earned is useful to know about — but it shouldn’t sit in the same mental bucket as a failed M-Pesa top-up or a pending KYC flag on your account. KiddyCash uses a structured category system to solve exactly this problem: routing the right information to the right place, at the right level of visibility.

Understanding how that routing works gives you real control over your experience — especially if you’re managing multiple kids’ wallets, running a school subscription, or overseeing a business campaign from Nairobi.

Channels vs. categories: the distinction that matters

KiddyCash separates how a notification reaches you (the channel) from what kind of event triggered it (the category).

Channels are delivery mechanisms: push notifications, in-app inbox, email, and SMS. A single event — say, a child spending KES 200 at a school canteen — can fire across multiple channels simultaneously, or just one, depending on your settings.

Categories are the classification layer beneath that. They determine priority, grouping, and which channels are even eligible for a given event type. You can visit your notification inbox directly to see how your current categories are grouped in practice.

The main category groups

KiddyCash organises notifications into four broad clusters:

  • Transactional — Wallet credits, debits, failed transfers, transaction code confirmations. These are high-priority by default and cannot be fully silenced on the parent or guardian account for compliance reasons.
  • Approval & activity — Triggered by Smart Approval flows: spending requests, approvals, declines. If you want a deeper look at how Smart Approval has evolved, the closer look at Smart Approval post covers the logic behind request routing, and what’s new in Smart Approval walks through recent updates worth knowing.
  • Account & compliance — KYC/KYB status changes, subscription renewals, business account flags, campaign milestones. These tend to be low-frequency but high-consequence.
  • Engagement & rewards — Badge awards, allowance streaks, school challenge completions. Lower urgency; can be batched into a daily digest if you prefer less noise.

How categories shape what you see in the inbox

When you open your notification inbox, you’ll notice notifications are pre-sorted by category rather than purely by timestamp. This is intentional. A KES 5,000 wallet credit that arrived this morning shouldn’t be buried under twelve badge notifications from the past week.

The category tag also affects read-state behaviour. Transactional and compliance notifications persist as unread until explicitly dismissed — they don’t auto-clear. Engagement notifications, by contrast, follow a softer read model. Once you read an unread notification, the category badge count updates immediately, but the item stays accessible in your history without requiring action.

Category-level controls vs. global mute

A common point of confusion: muting notifications globally is not the same as adjusting category preferences. Global mute suppresses channel delivery (push, SMS) but does not affect what gets written to your inbox. Category-level controls, on the other hand, let you suppress or batch specific types at the source — so a family account managing five kids’ wallets can keep transactional alerts instant while batching all badge notifications into a weekly summary.

These controls live inside your notifications settings, under the Preferences tab.