Notifications
Journey keeps the right people informed as work moves, but it's deliberate about how. The guiding idea is that clients hear from you by email, because that's how you reach people outside your firm, while your own team is kept informed inside the app rather than in their inboxes. Getting this split right is what lets Journey be communicative without being noisy.
The one thing that surprises people
Your staff are never sent notification emails. Everyone on your team (owner, manager, supervisor, preparer, assignee) is notified through the in-app notification bell, not their email. This is intentional. A firm processing dozens or hundreds of clients would otherwise generate a flood of internal email every time a document was uploaded or a status changed, and that flood is exactly what buries the messages that matter. So the bell carries the team's notifications, and inboxes stay clear.
Clients are the opposite. They're notified by email (and in their portal) because email is how you actually reach them. So if a staff member ever says "I didn't get an email about that," that's working as designed: their alert is waiting on the bell inside Journey.
What gets a notification
The events that notify someone are the ones where a person genuinely needs to know that it's their move:
- A return or request is assigned to a staff member: that person hears about it on the bell.
- A ticket's status changes: the client who owns it is notified by email and in the portal.
- A new comment or message is posted: the other side of the conversation is notified. Staff get a bell; a client gets an email. Internal comments are the exception that never reaches the client.
- A task is assigned to a staff member: that person gets a bell.
- A document checklist is completed, a signature is signed, or a questionnaire is finished: the relevant staff member gets a bell.
- For firms that prepare returns in Journey: a return's required documents are all in and every document has been read. Whoever the return is assigned to (or its department, if nobody is) gets one bell saying whether the draft calculated or what is still open. This is "Documents in, draft checked" in your settings.
- A completed return is delivered: the client is notified by email and in the portal that it's ready.
Choosing what you get notified about
Notification preferences are per person, in Settings under Notifications. Each member of your team controls their own: which events reach them, and on which channel. You set your own; you do not set anyone else's.
"Documents in, draft checked" has its own switch, separate from "All checklist items received", because it is a different moment: the documents are not only in, they have been read and the draft checked. It starts out the way you have "All checklist items received" set, so if you had switched that off, this one starts off too. Change either one and the other stays as it is. Owners' firm defaults work the same way.
Clients are notified by email. Your staff are notified in the app through the notification bell rather than by email, firm-wide, which is what keeps your team's inboxes clear while clients still hear from you.
Some notifications cannot be switched off. If you are the assignee on a ticket, you will hear about activity on it regardless of your preferences, because missing that is worse than the interruption.
Email templates and the log
Two related tools live alongside the rules. Email Templates let you customize the wording of the emails clients receive, so every message sounds like your firm. The Email Log is a record of every email actually sent to a client (who it went to, when, and whether it was delivered), which is the place to confirm a client was notified. Because staff bell notifications aren't emails, they don't appear in the log.
SMS
Text-message notifications are supported as well, but they depend on your firm's SMS setup being active and on the client having opted in. Where SMS isn't available, Journey simply falls back to what always works: email and the portal for clients, the bell for staff.