Messages

Overview

Messages is where Surfboard talks to you. When we publish a notice that concerns your business — a settlement change, a renewal, planned maintenance, a service update — it lands here, in the portal, addressed to your merchant account.

You’ll find it in the sidebar between Support and Settings. A small counter on the menu item shows how many notices you haven’t read yet.

Important: Subscribe an email address on the Messages page as soon as you have access to the portal. The inbox only helps if someone opens it. With a subscription, every notice also arrives as an email, so the right people hear about a settlement or service change the moment we publish it — not the next time somebody happens to log in.

Reading Messages

The page lists every notice sent to your account, newest first. Each one shows:

• Title and the date it was published
• Severity — Info, Warning, or Critical
• An unread dot until you open it

Click a message to expand it. Some include a link to the relevant page in the portal or to a guide. Once opened, a message is marked as read and the unread counter goes down.

Critical notices also appear as a banner across the top of the portal until they are read, so you won’t miss them even if you never visit the Messages page.

Subscribe to Email Notifications

At the bottom of the Messages page is the Email notifications card. Any address you add here receives every notice we publish to your account, as a branded email, in addition to it appearing in the portal.

To subscribe an address:

1. Open Messages from the sidebar and scroll to Email notifications.
2. Enter the address — the placeholder suggests notifications@yourcompany.com — and click Add.
3. We send a confirmation link to that address. Until it’s clicked, the address shows as Pending and receives nothing.
4. Once confirmed, the status changes to Active and notifications start with the next notice.

If the confirmation email didn’t arrive, click Resend next to the pending address. To stop emails to an address, click the ✕ next to it.

Which address to use

Subscriptions belong to your merchant account, not to an individual user, and the address does not need to be a portal login. That makes a shared mailbox the best choice:

• finance@ for anything about settlements and payouts
• ops@ or store@ so the people on the floor hear about terminal and service changes
• Your own address as well, if you’re the one who acts on these notices

You can add several. Anyone on your team with portal access can add or remove addresses.

Tip: Nothing is subscribed by default. A new merchant account starts with an empty list, so if you skip this step the notices only live in the portal.

Messages vs. Notifications

Messages are notices from Surfboard to you. The Notifications tab under Settings is different: those are alerts about your own activity — transactions, settlement reports, application updates — delivered by email, Slack, or webhook. Set up both.

Why It Matters

Most of what we send is time-sensitive. A settlement schedule change, a certificate renewal, or a maintenance window matters far more before it happens than after. Two minutes spent subscribing a shared mailbox means the notice reaches the people who need it, on the day we send it.