Email is the only channel
Text messaging is not part of Sitterz today. The groundwork is in the code and the screens are honest about it — the messaging settings say no number is set up, and a template tagged for text is kept and stays editable but is marked as not sending. Nothing you do in the product will make a text go out.
Phone notifications are the same story: they only work where an administrator has configured them for the deployment, and they are off unless that has happened.
Replying inside a thread does not email the family
This is the one that catches people. Typing a reply into an existing conversation in Messages appends it to that conversation and saves it. It does not send an email. If the family has a portal login they will see it next time they look; if they do not, nobody has told them anything.
The path that does deliver is starting a NEW conversation, which sends and then tells you plainly if there is no address on file for that contact. When something has to reach somebody today, do not assume a thread reply did it.
What does go out on its own
The messages tied to work: a receipt when a family requests a booking, a confirmation when you confirm it, a note when you cancel or move it, and the invoice pay link once you have switched that on. These are not marketing and they do not wait for an automation to be enabled.
Everything Sitterz sends goes through a single gate that applies the unsubscribe list, each contact's own preferences and your quiet hours before anything leaves. A refusal is recorded with the reason rather than swallowed, so you can see that a message was deliberately not sent.
Whether a family's reply comes back here
By default, replies go to your own mailbox — the one your email is sent from — and not into the Sitterz inbox. Routing replies into the shared inbox is something an administrator configures for the deployment and you then switch on in your messaging settings.
So if the shared inbox looks quiet, the likeliest reason is that your customers are replying to you somewhere else entirely, exactly as configured.
Saved templates do not change those emails
The message-template editor is worth knowing the shape of. Wording you save there is stored and shown back to you, but the transactional emails above — confirmations, cancellations, receipts — are rendered from their own built-in wording and do not read your saved version.
Editing a template therefore changes what you see in the editor and not what a family receives. Treat the editor as a place to draft and agree your wording, not as a control that alters live mail.