System notifications are the built-in events CoolFocus already tracks. On the Your notifications page they are grouped by area. For each event you turn channels on or off and set the timing.
1. Open your profile menu (avatar in the sidebar) and choose Your notifications.
2. Expand an area (Inbox, Give, Scheduler, and so on).
3. For each event, toggle the channels you want, In-App, SMS, Email, and pick the timing for email (Immediate, Daily, or Weekly). See Notification Channels and Timing & Digests.
Delivery stays off for each event and channel until you turn it on. Not every channel is offered for every event, and a few events are visible only to admin users. These settings are personal to your account.
An administrator can open a user's profile from Settings → Security → Users and select the Notifications tab to view and change that person's system notifications, the same matrix described on this page. This helps an admin turn on a booking alert or an unassigned-message alert for a teammate who has not set it up yet, without needing that person's login. Custom notifications still belong to the individual user and are not part of this admin view.
Events are organized by area. A sampling:
• Activities: task created, task assigned, task completed, task deleted
• Inbox: new message received, unassigned message, conversation assigned to you
• Give / CoolPay: contribution created / updated / deleted, pledge activity, recurring-gift failures, a payment that needs review
• Scheduler: new booking, appointment created / updated / cancelled / rescheduled
• Serve (Volunteers): new volunteer, application submitted, background check completed, service assignment
• Connect: person created / updated
• Activities: task created, task assigned, task completed, task deleted
• Outreach (Love INC): request created / assigned / completed, referral, voucher issued
• Pregnancy Center: visit created, visit outcome changed, client created / updated
• Points & Inventory: low stock alert (an item drops to or below its low-stock threshold), item restocked (an item climbs back above that threshold), checkout completed, checkout voided, item claimed, category claimed, stock received, stock adjusted
Task events live under Activities and show up for every organization, regardless of plan. Turn on Task Assigned if you only want a notification when a task is assigned to you, rather than every task activity on records you can see.
Task events live under Activities rather than Connect, so every organization can turn them on, including pregnancy center organizations that don't have the Connect module.
Some events, contributions, pledges, people, volunteers, appointments, and requests, show a filter (funnel) icon. This lets you narrow the event so you are only notified when the record matches your conditions. For example:
• Only notify me about contributions over $1,000
• Only notify me about contributions to a specific fund
• Only notify me about new people who are volunteers
Click the funnel, add one or more conditions (using operators like is, is not, greater than, less than, is any of), and the event will only reach you when a record fits.
Points & Inventory's low stock and restock events do not have a filter icon: once you turn one on, it applies to every inventory item that tracks stock and has a threshold set.
Inbox events are scoped to the right person, a new message or conversation assigned to you notifies you, and an unassigned message alerts people who have that event on so it gets picked up. These pair well with Immediate timing and SMS. Remember to turn the channels on first.
See Managing Conversations & Sending Messages in Inbox.
When a client books an appointment themselves through online scheduling, staff who have this event turned on receive a New Online Booking notification. Because SMS and email are not guaranteed private channels, this notification does not include the client's name. Instead it shows the appointment type, the center, and the date and time, for example:
New Online Booking - Pregnancy Test at Mission Viejo on Saturday, July 11, 2026 at 2:30 PM
Open the appointment from the Scheduler (or from the CoolFocus mobile app) to see the client's name and other details.
Events like the PlusLink appointment-pending-approval notice work the same way as every other event: no one, including admin users, receives it until they turn on a channel for it under Your notifications (or an admin turns it on for them from the Notifications tab on their user profile). If staff report that they never got an email or text about a provider-submitted appointment awaiting approval, check that they have the event enabled for the channel they expect.
Clicking a Low Stock Alert or Item Restocked notification takes you straight to that item's detail page in Points & Inventory, so you can check on-hand quantity or receive stock without hunting for the item first. See Inventory Tracking for how thresholds work.
Boutique checkout activity in Points & Inventory now raises its own events, so you can hear about it the same way you hear about any other system event, or use it to trigger a workflow (see Custom Approval Chains for Custom Charts for how CoolFocus builds workflows from trigger events):
• Checkout completed fires once per checkout, however many items it contains.
• Item claimed fires once for each distinct item in a checkout. Taking two of the same item in one visit fires the event once, not twice.
• Category claimed fires once for each distinct category represented in a checkout, useful for follow-up that applies to a whole category (for example, scheduling a fitting check after a car seat) rather than one specific item.
• Stock received fires when stock is received into inventory.
• Stock adjusted fires when someone records a manual stock adjustment, such as a count correction or damaged goods.
• Checkout voided fires when a completed checkout is voided and its stock restored. It does not retract or cancel anything the original checkout already triggered, an SMS that already went out cannot be unsent, so if you need to react to a void, turn that event on separately rather than assuming the original notification is undone.
If an item is marked Private (hide name on receipts) in Points & Inventory, its name is left out of these notifications the same way it is left off client receipts. This also applies to a category notification when any item in that category is private, since naming the category can identify the item just as easily as naming the item itself.
If you need a notification for a situation the built-in events do not cover, build your own, see Custom Notifications.
• Custom Notifications
• Notification Channels
• Notification Timing & Digests
• Notifications Overview
