Special handling notes

Release version: Yokohama

Updated July 18, 2025

5 minutes to read

Summarize

Summarized using AI

Summary of Special Handling Notes

The Special Handling Notes application in ServiceNow enables users to create and manage notes that highlight important information about individual records, such as cases or accounts. These notes help bring critical details to the attention of users working on specific records, improving awareness of special circumstances. Notes can be created for single records or sets of records meeting defined conditions and can also display notes from related records like accounts or products.

Show full answer Show less

Important: Special handling notes are intended for exceptional situations, not regular workflow processing. Avoid having more than 10,000 notes on an instance and minimize complex conditions or dot walking to prevent performance degradation.

Key Features

Configuration: Admin users (with the snshn.admin role) can configure entity tables (e.g., Case table) to use special handling notes and determine how they display—either as pop-up windows or embedded/related lists on forms.
Role-based access: Admins can create, update, and delete notes; editors can view and update; users can view notes.
Note attributes: Each note includes a message, status (Active, Inactive, Expired), priority (Critical, High, Moderate, Low with color coding), effective start date, and expiration date.
Pop-up window display: Shows active notes when a record is accessed, listing message and priority. Notes can be dismissed individually.
Embedded list display: Shows active notes on forms with message, expiration date, and priority details.
Resurfacing notes: Agents can reopen dismissed pop-up windows via the "Special handling notes" action on certain record pages in CSM Configurable Workspace.
Automatic status updates: A daily scheduled job activates notes based on the effective date and expires notes upon reaching their expiration date.
Domain separation support: The application supports domain separation as a process-separated table, ensuring multi-domain environments handle notes correctly.

Practical Considerations for ServiceNow Customers

Use special handling notes sparingly for exceptional cases to avoid clutter and performance issues.
Configure notes thoughtfully to appear in the most useful format for your agents—pop-up or embedded list.
Leverage roles to control who can create, edit, or view notes, maintaining data integrity and appropriate access.
Set effective and expiration dates to automate note visibility and lifecycle management.
Educate agents on how to dismiss and resurface notes in the CSM Configurable Workspace to ensure important information is acknowledged but not obtrusive.

The Special Handling Notes application enables you to create notes that bring important information about individual records, such as a case or account record, to the user's attention.

Special Handling Notes pop-up window displaying multiple notes with header, description, and priority illustrated with colours. — Figure 1. Special handling notes in CSM Configurable Workspace

You can create special handling notes for specific records or for a set of records that meet one or more conditions. You can also configure this application to display any special handling notes from related records, such as the account or the product associated with a customer service case.

Important:

Use special handling notes for special circumstances and not for the general case processing workflow. It is not recommended to have more than 10k special handling notes on an instance. In addition, avoid complex conditions and use dot walking sparingly when creating special handling notes. Having a large number of notes with complex conditions can affect the load time.

Configuring special handling notes

Users with the sn_shn.admin role can configure the desired entity tables, such as the Case table, to use special handling notes. Special handling notes can be configured to display in the following ways:

For more information, see the following configuration topics:

Creating, updating, and deleting special handling notes

Users with the sn_shn.admin role can create, update, and delete special handling notes. Users with the sn_shn.editor role can view and update notes and users with the sn_shn.user role can view notes. For more information about creating special handling notes, see the following topics:

Special handling notes display important information to the user. In addition to a message, a special handling note also has a status, an assigned priority, and an expiration date.

The status of a note can be one of the following:

Table 1. Special handling note states
Status	Definition
Active	The note is active. Active notes appear on the Special Handling Notes list or pop-up window. Active notes remain on the list until they are set to Inactive or Expired. Active notes remain on the pop-up window until dismissed or until they are set to Inactive or Expired.
Inactive	The note is no longer active. Users with the sn_shn.admin or sn_shn.editor role can set a note to Inactive if the information in the note is no longer useful. When a note is set to Inactive, it is removed from the Special Handling Notes list or pop-up window. Inactive notes can be viewed by navigating to Special Handling Notes > Special Handling Notes.
Expired	The note has reached it's expiration date or it has been expired manually. If a note is expired, the form becomes read-only for all user roles other than the system administrator. A note is expired automatically by a scheduled job when it reaches it's expiration date. The scheduled job also sets any inactive notes to expired if the inactive notes have reached their expiration date.

A note can be assigned one of the following priorities. Each priority has an associated color, which is displayed as a colored bar in the pop-up window and as a colored circle in the Priority field in a list. The Core UI and the CSM Configurable Workspace interface use different colors to represent priority.

Table 2. Special handling note priorities
Priority	Core UI	CSM Configurable Workspace
1 - Critical	Red	Red
2 - High	Orange	Orange
3 - Moderate	Green	Purple
4 - Low	Blue	Gray

When creating a special handling note, you can make it effective right away or you can select a date when it becomes effective. You can also select an expiration date.

Special handling notes pop-up window

Special handling notes can be displayed on a form in a pop-up window. Users with the sn_shn.admin role can configure a form to display the Special Handling Notes pop-up window. This window appears when you access a record that has one or more active notes. The pop-up window displays the following information for each note:

Message
Priority

To dismiss a note, click Dismiss. Once you dismiss a note, it no longer appears in the pop-up window. To close the Special Handling Notes pop-up window, click X.

Special handling notes list

Special handling notes can be displayed on a form in an embedded or related list. Users with the sn_shn.admin role can configure a form to display the Special Handling Notes list. This list appears on a form when there are one or more active notes for a record. The Special Handling Notes list displays the following information for a note:

Message
Expiration date
Priority
Table

Resurfacing special handling notes

Special handling notes are typically displayed in a pop-up window when a record is opened. Agents can view the special handling notes, dismiss individual notes, and close the window. If an agent closes the window, they can open it again and display the special handling notes without closing and reopening the record tab in CSM Configurable Workspace.

To open the special handling notes pop-up window after it has been closed, select Special handling notes from the More actions menu () on the action bar. If no special handling notes are available, the system displays an informational message: “No special handling notes are available.”

The Special handling notes action that agents can use to reopen the special handling notes window is currently available on the following record pages in CSM Configurable Workspace:

Front-line case page
CSM default record page

Expiring special handling notes

The Deactivate Special Handling Notes scheduled job, which runs daily at midnight, checks the dates in the Effective on and Expires on fields for each note.

If a special handling note has reached its Effective on date, the scheduled job sets the status of the note to Active.
If a special handling note has reached its Expires on date, the scheduled job sets the status of the note to Expired.

Domain separation for Special Handling Notes

The Special Handling Notes application supports domain separation as a process-separated table.

When inserting or updating a special handling note, the picker domain scope takes precedence by design with the Overrides [sys_overrides] field on process-separated tables. For more information, see Process administration.