Inbox

The Inbox is DayZero's unified notification feed. Every alert, approval request, anomaly, sync event, ledger change, and announcement that needs your attention lands here as a single row with a status, a topic, and a severity — so nothing gets lost across screens. Open it from the sidebar (it renders the Notifications view at /books/inbox), pick the scope you care about, and work the feed top to bottom.

Key capabilities

• One feed across every business you belong to, with a Me / Business / Firm scope switch (Firm is gated to firm staff by the backend)
• A real status workflow — Open / Snoozed / Done tabs backed by a new → seen → resolved | dismissed | snoozed state machine
• Topic filter chips (anomaly, billing, AP approvals, Plaid, month-end, ledger, notes, email ingest, reconciliation, manual) with live server-side counts
• Severity chips (Info, Warning, Urgent); warning and urgent rows get a colored left border
• Pin important rows to the top of the Open tab
• Snooze with presets — 1 hour, 4 hours, Tomorrow 9am, 1 week — and the row reappears when the timer elapses
• Resolve or Dismiss (both terminal), plus Mark all seen to clear the unread dots in bulk
• A deep-link action button that jumps straight to the related record (bill, invoice, transaction, report, etc.)
• Live virtual rows (low cash, stale Plaid connection, etc.) merged into the feed and tagged "Live"
• A real-time Server-Sent Events stream that pushes new items instantly, with a 30-second poll as a backstop for the bell badge
• Multi-channel fan-out per topic: in-app always, Slack when a webhook is configured, email when the topic policy allows
• A bell badge that counts only Open (new + seen) items for your current scope

How it works

When something happens — a bill enters an approval gate, an anomaly is detected, a bank sync finishes — a publisher hands the event to the notification policy. The policy resolves who should be notified (the business owner, all business users, the per-tier approver, mentioned users, or firm staff) and which channels fire, then writes one row per recipient and fans out.

flowchart TD
  event["Event (bill gate, anomaly, sync, mention)"] --> policy{"Audience + channel policy by topic"}
  policy --> rows["Notification rows (recipient: user / business / firm)"]
  rows --> feed["Inbox feed (/books/inbox)"]
  rows -->|"Slack if enabled"| slack["Slack webhook"]
  rows -->|"email per policy"| email["Email"]
  feed --> stream["Live SSE stream + bell badge"]
  feed --> act{"You act"}
  act -->|"open / mark seen"| seen["Seen"]
  act -->|"snooze"| snoozed["Snoozed (wakes later)"]
  act -->|"resolve / dismiss"| done["Done (terminal)"]

How to use it

1. Open Inbox from the sidebar — the bell badge shows how many Open items wait on you.
2. Use the Me / Business / Firm switch in the header to choose the audience slice. Me spans all your businesses; Business scopes to the active business; Firm shows the advisor feed.
3. Switch between the Open, Snoozed, and Done tabs to focus on what's actionable now versus deferred or finished.
4. Click severity chips (Info / Warning / Urgent) and topic chips to filter; chips show live counts and hide topics with zero items. Click Clear to reset.
5. Click any row to open the detail panel on the right — a new row is auto-marked seen when you open it.
6. Use the row's action button (e.g. "Review bill") to jump to the underlying record.
7. From the detail header, Pin, Snooze (pick a preset), Resolve, or Dismiss the item.
8. In the Open tab, click Mark all seen to clear unread dots across the visible feed in one action.

Pro tips

• Stay in the Me scope for your personal triage; switch to Business or Firm only when you're working on someone else's behalf or doing a portfolio sweep.
• Snooze instead of dismiss for things you can't action yet — a dismissed row is terminal, but a snoozed row resurfaces in the Open tab when its timer elapses.
• Filter to Urgent severity first thing each morning — those are the rows the policy also escalates to Slack/email.
• Pin the one or two items you're actively working so they stay at the top of Open even as new rows arrive.
• "Live" rows are computed, not stored — dismissing one hides it for you specifically; it can reappear if the underlying condition (e.g. low cash) recurs.
• Tune per-topic noise in notification preferences rather than dismissing repeatedly — you can mute routine sync pings while keeping urgent reconnect alerts.

In-depth guide

Scopes and audience routing

Every notification is addressed to a recipient — a single user, a whole business, or an entire firm — and the read path unions across the three based on your memberships. The scope switch picks which slice you see:

• Me — everything addressed to you across all your businesses.
• Business — filtered to one business.
• Firm — the firm advisor feed (only firm staff can load it).

Who actually receives a row is decided per topic by the audience policy:

• Billing → the business owner (and firm owners).
• AP approvals → the per-tier approver (and the assigned advisor).
• Operational alerts (anomalies, Plaid health) → the owner plus the full firm staff bench.

Status lifecycle

Status replaces the old read/starred/archived flags with a single state machine. Open = new or seen; Done = resolved or dismissed.

Severity

Severity drives visual urgency and, for some topics, whether email fires.

Topics

Topic answers "what domain is this about?" and powers the filter chips and per-topic counts. The chip row hides any topic with a zero count so it stays scannable.

Channels and delivery

Each topic declares how it fans out. In-app (the Inbox) is the constant; Slack and email are conditional.

Delivery is best-effort: if Slack or email fails, the in-app row is still written, so the Inbox is the source of truth.

Email ingestion

• Forwarded documents (e.g. vendor invoices sent to your DayZero ingest address) raise the email_ingest topic so the business owner sees that something arrived and was processed.
• By policy these are in-app only — no Slack or email — to avoid a notification echoing the email you just forwarded.

Linking to entities and action buttons

• Rows carry an optional polymorphic entity reference (entity_type + entity_id) plus an action_url / action_label.
• When present, the detail panel renders the action button so one click takes you to the bill, invoice, transaction, or report the notification is about — no hunting required.

Live (virtual) notifications

• Some signals — low cash, a stale Plaid connection — are computed on every read rather than stored as durable rows.
• They appear inline tagged Live and merge into the feed for the business in context.
• Because they aren't persistent, dismissing one is recorded per user in a small dismissals table keyed to the signal — and the item can return if the condition recurs.

Real-time stream and the bell badge

• The feed subscribes to a Server-Sent Events stream that delivers new rows the instant they're published across any server or background worker, with heartbeats to keep the connection alive through proxies.
• If the real-time layer is unavailable, the stream stays idle and a 30-second poll keeps the bell badge's Open count correct.
• The badge counts only Open (new + seen) items for your current scope.

Edge cases

• Selecting the Business scope with no active business shows a "no business selected" prompt instead of an empty feed.
• Mark all seen only affects new rows currently in the list; it doesn't resolve or dismiss anything.
• Terminal rows (resolved, dismissed) won't transition again — reopening isn't supported, so prefer Snooze when you might need the item back.
• Pinning and snoozing apply to durable rows only; Live rows can't be pinned or snoozed.

Start free and keep everything that needs you in one prioritized feed.