Stay on top of approvals without watching the app
When an employee needs your decision or approval before continuing, an email notification reaches you even if you have stepped away from Sistava, so the request does not sit unanswered.
Email Notifications
Sistava emails you when an employee finishes work, needs your approval, hits a blocker, or your credit balance runs low, so nothing important gets stuck waiting for you to open the app. You choose which categories of email you want; account security and billing mail stay on because they carry information you need regardless of your other preferences.
The bell icon in your workspace is the primary notification channel, and it fires for every event that matters: an employee finishing a task, someone mentioning you in a comment, a teammate messaging you directly. Email is the secondary channel, the one that reaches you when you are not sitting in front of the app watching that bell.
You control email by category, not by individual event type. Open Settings > Notifications > Preferences and you will find a short list: employee updates, task activity, comments and mentions, input requests, human messages, account and security, billing and credits. Flip any of them off and Sistava stops sending that category to your inbox, while the matching bell notification still shows up in-app. Two categories, account and security and billing and credits, are locked on because missing a payment failure or a security notice is not a preference, it is a risk.
What keeps this from turning into inbox noise is the delivery logic behind it, not just the toggle list. Chatty notification types (like routine employee updates) carry a minimum gap between sends per type, and every tenant has a hard ceiling of 2 emails an hour and 4 a day across all categories combined, so a busy day with five employees running in parallel does not turn into five separate emails landing in the same minute. Credit alerts sit outside that cap entirely: they follow a fixed ladder at 25%, 15%, and 0% remaining, each threshold fires once, and the 0% alert is the one email you cannot mute, because it means your employees' work has actually paused.
None of this costs credits. Notifications, in-app or by email, are a platform feature you get on every plan, not a metered part of what your employees do.
What Triggers an Email
An employee finishing a piece of work or reaching out with something to share, a task being marked done or assigned to you, someone replying to or mentioning you in a comment thread, an employee waiting on your approval or a decision, a payment succeeding or failing or a plan changing, a teammate messaging you directly, and your credit balance crossing the 25%, 15%, or 0% remaining thresholds.
Each of these maps to a bell notification every time. Whether it also becomes an email depends on your category preferences (for most types) or is fixed and cannot be turned off (for credit alerts at 15% and 0%, and for account/billing mail).
Keeping Your Inbox Under Control
Two limits work together so email notifications stay useful instead of becoming noise. Per-type pacing puts a minimum gap between two emails of the same chatty category, so a stream of routine employee updates does not turn into a stream of separate emails. A tenant-wide cap of 2 emails an hour and 4 a day covers everything combined, so even a mix of different categories firing at once cannot flood your inbox.
Credit alerts are the deliberate exception. They are not part of the category list you toggle, they follow a fixed ladder (25% bell-only, 15% bell and email, 0% bell and email with work paused), each level fires once until your balance moves again, and they are exempt from the general rate limit because missing one means your employees stop working with no warning.
How It Works
In-app first, email as the catch-up channel
Every notification-worthy event creates a bell notification first. Some of those events are also configured to send email, either immediately or after a short delay if you have not opened the bell notification yet, since the point of the email is to reach you when you are away, not to duplicate what you already saw.
Preferences are per-category, not per-event: an employee update and an employee reaching out proactively both fall under one "employee updates" toggle, for example. Underneath the toggles, per-type rate limiting and a global 2/hour, 4/day cap on the tenant keep the volume sane even if several employees generate email-worthy events close together. Credit-alert emails at 15% and 0% remaining bypass the general cap because they carry information you need to see the moment it happens.
Use Cases
Catch a failed payment before it becomes a service gap
Billing and credit alert emails are locked on, so a failed charge, an ending trial, or your credit balance running low reaches your inbox even if you have muted every other category.
Trim your inbox to only what matters to you
If you only care about direct human messages and input requests, turn off employee update and task activity email and keep the bell as your feed for the rest, without losing coverage on anything critical.
Follow a comment thread without checking back manually
A reply or mention in a comment thread sends an email under its own category, so a conversation attached to a task or document can pull you back in exactly when someone needs your input.
FAQ
Which notifications actually reach my inbox by email?
Whichever categories you have switched on in Settings > Notifications > Preferences: employee updates, task activity, comments and mentions, input requests, and human messages are all optional. Account and security mail and billing and credits mail are locked on because they carry information you need regardless of your other choices.
Will I get an email every single time something happens?
No. Email backs up the in-app bell rather than mirroring it event for event: it is paced per category and capped at 2 emails an hour and 4 a day across your whole account, so a burst of activity from several employees collapses into a manageable number of emails instead of flooding your inbox.
Can I turn off credit balance emails?
The 25% threshold is bell-only with no email. The 15% and 0% thresholds always send email in addition to the bell, and that cannot be disabled, because a missed 0% alert means your employees' work has paused without you knowing. Each threshold fires once and only re-fires if your balance drops further or is refilled.
Do email notifications cost credits?
No. Notifications, whether in-app or by email, are a platform feature on every plan and never draw down your credit balance.
Can I send notifications to Slack or my phone instead of email?
Not yet. Email and the in-app bell are the two channels live today; push notifications and Slack delivery are planned but not built.
Where Email Notifications fits
Email Notifications is part of How you see what they did.
A real-time activity feed shows who is working on what right now. The step-by-step inspector traces every tool call, decision, and reasoning chain. Cost tracking breaks down spend per message, per employee, and per team. Walk through your live 3D office to see your workforce at a glance.
- How you see what they did: See everything. Miss nothing.
Read the guide
More in Monitoring
- Activity Timeline: See every piece of work your AI employees do as it happens: chat replies, scheduled runs, tool calls, delegations, and finished deliverables, all logged as activities you can open and inspect. It runs automatically for every employee with no setup, and a live feed in the workspace sidebar shows actions as they occur so you never have to wonder what is happening right now.
- Action Inspector: Click into any single activity and see exactly what your AI employee did: the model call pipeline, every tool it used with inputs and outputs, cost broken down by category, a duration waterfall, and the plan it followed. Available from the Activity tab, from Inspect on any chat message, or from the sidebar timeline.
- See What Your Employee Is Told: Open any activity in the Activity Inspector and read the exact system prompt your AI employee received for that run: every instruction, every tool definition, and the manifest of which skills and duties were loaded and why. Nothing paraphrased, nothing summarized, the same text the model saw.
- Credit Usage History: See exactly where your monthly credits go: split spend from direct employee requests and automation or system work, then inspect every charged system operation, including AI work, tools, Officer checks, knowledge, voice, meetings, video, and email. A burn chart shows the trend over time, and a separate grants table lists every bonus credit you received from promos, referrals, or purchases, with source and date.
- Spending Limit: Set a ceiling on how many credits your workforce can spend per hour, day, week, or month, so a runaway task or a busy day never turns into a surprise bill.
- Team Dashboards: Every team gets its own dashboard the moment you open it: team health, the current sprint, work in flight, momentum, objectives, and KPI progress, all built from data the platform already has. On the Custom plan, connect data sources and the same dashboard adds Revenue & Pipeline, Demand & Conversion, and Reach & Engagement cards for that team.
- Data Export: Every workspace surface that shows your history, chat threads, the task board, activity logs, and Drive files, has its own download control that exports the current, filtered view as Markdown, CSV, or JSON. Use it to pull records for an audit, share a run outside the app, or keep an offline copy of what an employee produced.
- Review the Quality of Every Deliverable: After an employee does real work, a quality reviewer scores each deliverable against a standard and shows the verdict in the activity inspector. Everyday chat is left alone, so you only grade real output.
- 3D Office View: A workforce of AI employees is easy to lose track of as a list of chat threads. The 3D Office View turns it into a place: every employee is a character at a desk, hot-desk, or the lounge, moving between them live as their status changes, so you can see your whole company working at a glance instead of clicking through tabs.
- In-App Notifications: See the moment an Employee finishes work, needs a decision from you, or your credit balance runs low, through a bell icon in your workspace that always fires. Reply straight from the notification drawer for Employee updates and comment threads, and control which events also reach your email through a short list of categories.
- Reply to Notifications: Reply straight from the notification drawer, whether it is an update from an Employee or a comment on your work, and your response goes back with the full context of what it is replying to. No need to open the chat or dig up the artifact first.
- Email Digest Notifications: A rolled-up email that summarizes what your AI employees did over a set period, instead of a separate message for every event. Today, notification email in Sistava sends per event and per category (employee updates, task completion, credit alerts, and so on); a digest option that batches those into one scheduled email is planned but not built yet.