Last Updated: June 2026
Before we moved to Acumatica internally, our Controller spent three to six hours every month manually sending overdue invoice emails. She’d run a trial balance, find the invoices past 45 days, and send individual emails to each client. Clients would often say they never got the original bill. Then she’d spend more time resending it. Read More Here
That same process now takes zero hours. A Business Event in Acumatica handles it automatically on the 15th of every month.
That’s what Acumatica email notifications can do when they’re set up correctly. The question most people have isn’t whether they should use them. It’s where to start.
What Business Events Actually Are
Here’s the thing: Acumatica email notifications aren’t a standalone feature with a simple on/off switch. They’re built on top of a tool called Business Events, which is Acumatica’s built-in workflow automation engine.
A Business Event is a trigger. You tell Acumatica to watch a specific set of data, and when something changes or a condition is met, the system takes an action. That action can be sending an email, firing a push notification, kicking off an import scenario, or creating a task. For most companies, email is the most common subscriber type.
The reason this matters is that understanding the Business Events structure upfront saves a lot of confusion during setup. You’re not just writing an email and scheduling it. You’re building a three-part system: a data source to monitor, a trigger condition, and a subscriber action that fires when the condition is met.
Once you understand that structure, Acumatica email notifications become genuinely flexible. You can set them up for almost any event in the system.
What You Can Automate
Before getting into the setup steps, it’s worth seeing the range of what’s possible. The most common scenarios we see mid-sized distribution and manufacturing companies use include:
Overdue invoice alerts. Send an automated email to customers when invoices hit a specific age threshold, 30, 45, or 60 days. You can personalize the email with dynamic fields so it pulls the customer name, invoice number, and balance owed automatically.
Purchase order approval notifications. When a PO is submitted and sits in “Pending Approval” status, send the assigned approver an alert. If they haven’t acted within a set timeframe, trigger a follow-up. This keeps purchasing from stalling in someone’s inbox.
Low inventory alerts. When stock for a specific item drops below a reorder threshold, notify the purchasing manager automatically. No more waiting until you’re out of something to discover you should have ordered it two weeks ago.
Shipment confirmations. When an order ships, send the customer an automatic notification. This is a simple one to set up and cuts down on inbound “where’s my order” calls significantly.
Workflow exception alerts. When something goes wrong in a process, such as an expense report being rejected or a sales order being placed on hold, notify the right person automatically so it gets addressed the same day.
These aren’t hypothetical. CAL uses Acumatica Business Events internally to keep account owners in the loop when activities are logged against their clients. When someone schedules a development project or an upgrade for one of our Acumatica clients, the account owner gets notified automatically. It has saved more than a few situations where the right person didn’t know what was happening with their account.
How to Set Up Acumatica Email Notifications
The setup follows a consistent pattern regardless of what you’re automating. Here’s how it works.
Step 1: Build or identify your Generic Inquiry. Every Business Event in Acumatica is driven by a Generic Inquiry, which is the data source the system watches. This is the query that returns the records you want to monitor. For overdue invoices, that might be an AR aging inquiry filtered for invoices over 45 days old. For low inventory, it’s an inquiry returning items below their reorder quantity. If you don’t have the right GI already, you’ll need to build one. Acumatica includes a number of standard inquiries out of the box, and many common scenarios are already covered.
Step 2: Create the Business Event. Navigate to Business Events in Acumatica and create a new event. Give it a clear, descriptive name. Assign your Generic Inquiry as the data source. Then define the monitoring type. You have two main options: you can trigger the event when a record changes, or you can run the event on a schedule. For overdue invoice reminders, a schedule makes sense. For approval notifications or exception alerts, a record change trigger is usually the right call.
Step 3: Set your trigger conditions. This is where you narrow down exactly when the notification fires. You’re filtering the data your GI returns to identify the specific records that should trigger an action. For an overdue invoice event, your condition might be that the invoice age is greater than 45 days and the balance is greater than zero. Getting this right is important. Conditions that are too broad result in too many notifications. Conditions that are too narrow might miss records you actually need to catch.
Step 4: Configure the subscriber. Once your trigger fires, Acumatica needs to know what to do. Go to the Subscribers tab and create a new Email Notification subscriber. This opens the Email Template screen where you build the actual email. You can use dynamic data fields pulled from your Generic Inquiry to personalize the message with the recipient’s name, the relevant document number, amounts, dates, and more. You also define where the email comes from (a system email account) and where it goes.
Step 5: Enable the Business Event. Toggle the event to Active. From this point, Acumatica will monitor the data and fire the notification when your conditions are met. Check the Emails Pending Processing screen after your first test to confirm the notification queued correctly and went out as expected.
Acumatica’s own technical documentation on using Business Events to automate processes goes deeper on the configuration options if you want to see exactly how the fields map out. It’s also worth watching CAL’s video on streamlining tasks with Business Events if you prefer to see the setup in action before diving in yourself.
A Few Things to Watch For
Acumatica email notifications are not difficult to set up, but there are a few details that catch people off guard.
Email delivery timing matters. By default, Acumatica doesn’t always send Business Event emails instantly. You may need to configure an automation schedule to process outgoing emails at a set interval, such as every few minutes, depending on how time-sensitive the notification is. For approval alerts where someone needs to act quickly, this is worth getting right.
Generic Inquiry filters affect everything. If your GI returns more records than intended, you’ll over-notify. If the conditions on your Business Event don’t match the data structure of your GI, the event may not fire at all. Test in a sandbox environment before pushing to production.
One event, one action type. If you need to both send an email and create a task when a condition is met, you’ll add multiple subscribers to the same Business Event rather than building two separate events. Keeping the logic in one place makes it easier to maintain.
This Is One of Acumatica’s Most Underused Features
Here’s what drives me crazy about this: most Acumatica users have Business Events available and aren’t using them. The manual processes they’re running every week, the follow-up emails they’re writing by hand, the status checks they’re doing in the system because nobody set up an alert, all of that is automatable.
If you’re already on Acumatica, the automation capabilities are sitting there waiting to be used. Acumatica email notifications through Business Events are a strong starting point, and they connect to the broader automation story that makes Acumatica genuinely powerful for mid-sized operations.
CAL Business Solutions is an Acumatica implementation partner serving manufacturing, distribution, professional services, and mobility/DME businesses across Connecticut and the northeastern United States. Our team helps mid-sized operations replace manual processes with automation built into the ERP they already own.
Contact CAL Business Solutions to talk through your Acumatica automation setup.
