Occasionally, the system will need to communicate a problem to you. This may be because you are asking it to do something it has been programmed to prevent, or because the system has detected an error with data that needs sorting out.
Most error messages are displayed like this:
The message will disappear on its own when the system thinks you have had time to read it, but there are two things you can do to change that:
- Click on the pin glyph in the top right. This will pin the message to give you longer to think about it. The content of the message is sometimes necessarily quite technical, so this is sometimes very helpful.
- Click on the X in the top right. This will remove the message.
Quite often (including in the example above) the system is telling you about a problem it has detected with whatever you are trying to do (in this case add a finish date to a contract). In such cases there will almost always be a hyperlink to a screen that shows the problem data. In this case clicking on the word "Here" in blue will open up a form showing an event that is due to take place after the intended finish date. You can open that link in a new tab by right clicking on it, then fix the problem and close the tab. At that point you can retry what you were doing. If there are no further problems, it will succeed - otherwise you will get another error dialog with a link to a different screen. You should deal with this in the same way. Once all problems have been dealt with you will be able to complete your action.