Notifications

How notifications work

Notifications surface the moments that matter to you and your team: a client paid an invoice, a proposal was opened, a teammate mentioned you in a note, or a period is waiting for approval. Instead of hunting through each page, you get a running feed of the things worth knowing about.

Two kinds of updates

The notification center holds two kinds of updates, and it helps to know the difference:

• Things that happened - one-off events at a point in time, such as a payment arriving or a proposal being opened. These stay in your feed as history even after you read them.
• Things that still need doing - open work that sits there until someone handles it, such as an overdue invoice or a contract waiting for approval. These live under the Needs attention view and clear themselves the moment the work is done.

Where notifications live

Notifications appear inside Belvak while you are signed in - in the bell and the notification center. They are separate from the automatic activity log, which records every change your team makes for auditing. Think of the activity log as the full history of what changed, and notifications as the short list of what is worth your attention right now. If your team works in Slack, an admin can also send these notifications to your Slack channels.

They update on their own

The bell checks for new notifications on its own about every 15 seconds while you have Belvak open, so the count stays current without a page refresh. Dates such as "due today" and "overdue" follow your own device time zone.

The notification bell

The bell is your at-a-glance signal that something needs you. It is always one click away, wherever you are in the platform.

Finding the bell

On a computer, the bell sits in the sidebar next to your name. On a phone or small screen, it moves to the top bar beside the settings gear. It looks the same everywhere, so you always know where to glance.

The badge

A small badge on the bell tells you what is waiting:

• A red number is your count of unread notifications - new things that happened since you last looked.
• A small dot with no number means nothing is unread, but there is still open work in Needs attention worth a look.
• No badge means you are all caught up.

The quick preview

On a computer, clicking the bell opens a compact preview of your latest unread notifications so you can scan them in place. Click any row to jump straight to the record it is about, or choose Open notification center at the bottom to see everything. On a phone, tapping the bell takes you directly to the full notification center.

The notification center

The notification center is the full-page view of everything, reached from the bell. It groups your notifications by day (Today, Yesterday, Earlier) so recent items are always on top, and loads older ones as you scroll.

Notifications, Previous, and Needs attention

Three chips at the top switch between views:

• Notifications - your unread feed, shown by default, with a count of how many are unread.
• Previous - the history of notifications you have already read, kept so you can look something up later.
• Needs attention - the open work that is still waiting, described in the next section.

Opening a notification

Click any notification to go straight to the record it is about - the invoice, project, proposal, client follow-up, or wherever the action happened. Opening a notification also marks it as read, so it moves from your unread feed into Previous.

Marking notifications as read

There are two ways to clear your unread feed. Open a notification to read just that one, or use Mark all as read in the header to clear everything at once. Read notifications are never deleted by this - they simply move to Previous. Your read and unread state is your own, so marking things read does not change what your teammates see.

Needs attention

The Needs attention view is a live to-do list of open work, rather than a feed of past events. It is the answer to "what is still waiting on us?"

Reminders that clear themselves

Each item here is calculated fresh every time, straight from your records. That means you never have to dismiss these reminders by hand: the moment the underlying work is done - the invoice is paid, the period is approved, the follow-up is completed - the item disappears on its own, for everyone. There is nothing to check off.

What shows up here

Needs attention groups your open work into a short list of reminders. Depending on what your role can access, these can include things like:

• Recurring invoices and contracts waiting to be reviewed and approved
• Invoices that are overdue and still owe a balance
• Your client follow-ups that are due or overdue
• Commission payouts and employee payments that are still pending
• Timesheets that have not been submitted yet, and invitations about to expire
• Storage running low, and proposals that have passed their date

Click any reminder to open the relevant page and take care of it.

Amounts and age

Where it helps, a reminder shows a little more context: the total amount involved (kept separate per currency, never mixed together) and how long the oldest item has been waiting. This makes it easy to see, for example, how much is tied up in overdue invoices at a glance.

Who sees what

You only see what you can access

Notifications respect the same roles and permissions as the rest of the platform. You are only notified about the areas your role can view. Someone without access to invoices, for instance, will not see payment or overdue-invoice notifications, and personal items such as a follow-up assigned to you go only to you.

Read state is personal

Your unread count, what you have read, and your Previous history are yours alone. Reading or clearing your notifications never changes what a teammate sees in their own bell.

When your access changes

If your role changes, your notifications adjust automatically. Items tied to an area you can no longer view drop out of your feed, and areas you gain access to start showing up. You do not need to do anything to keep the list accurate.

Sending notifications to Slack

If your team already works in Slack, you can send the same notifications there too, so the moments that matter show up in the channels people are already watching. This is an optional add-on to the in-app bell, not a replacement: everything keeps working inside Belvak whether or not Slack is connected. Sending notifications to Slack is available on the Professional plan.

Connecting Slack

An admin sets this up once for the whole team. Go to Settings, open the Integrations tab, and choose Slack. You are taken to Slack to approve the connection with a standard workspace install, then brought back to Belvak. One Slack workspace connects to your Belvak workspace, and only someone with the workspace settings permission can connect it, change it, or disconnect it. The same Integrations tab is also where you can sync your books with QuickBooks or set up the API and webhooks for your own automations.

Choosing a default channel and routing events

After connecting, pick a default channel where notifications land unless you say otherwise. From there you can route each type of event to its own channel, or let several share one. You might send payment updates to a finance channel and new proposals to a sales channel, for example, while everything else falls back to your default.

Which events are on by default

To keep things quiet on day one, five team-facing events are switched on the moment you connect:

• An online payment received from a client
• An invoice fully paid
• A proposal opened for the first time by a client
• A proposal approved or declined
• A new teammate joining your workspace

Every other event stays off until an admin turns it on, so your channels only fill up with what you actually choose to share.

The visibility warning

Everyone in a Slack channel can read what is posted there, including people who would not normally see that information inside Belvak. That makes routing and visibility the same decision. Belvak shows a clear warning before you turn on events that can carry personal or sensitive details, so you can make sure they only go to a channel with the right people in it. Inside Belvak, who sees what is set by each person's role; in Slack, it is set by who is in the channel.

Posting to private channels

Public channels are ready to use as soon as you connect. To send notifications to a private channel, invite the Belvak app (@Belvak) to that channel first, and it will then appear as a channel you can route to. Belvak only ever posts to channels you choose, never to anyone's direct messages.

What Belvak can and cannot see

Belvak only posts messages to the channels you pick. It never reads your Slack messages or history, never sends or replies to direct messages, and there is no two-way sync. Each message it posts includes the record's reference number, the amount where that applies, and a link straight back to the record in Belvak. If Slack is briefly unavailable, messages are queued and delivered automatically in the background, so nothing in Belvak is ever held up.

Disconnecting Slack

An admin can disconnect Slack at any time from the same Settings, Integrations screen. Disconnecting stops all future messages, cancels anything still waiting to be delivered, and removes Belvak's access to the workspace. You can reconnect and set your channels up again whenever you like.