Choose which notifications you get

HQ can tell you when something happens while you are away from the app. On your phone, open More and tap Notifications, under Settings. The row says whether notifications are on and how many kinds you get.

Turn on the On this phone switch at the top of that screen. You will be asked once by your phone or browser to allow it.

The first time you open HQ from your phone's Home Screen, a line at the top asks whether you want a notification when new email arrives. Tap Turn on and allow it when your phone asks. Your phone has to be asked by you, so HQ cannot switch them on for you when it is installed. If you tap Not now, the line does not come back, and you can turn them on later in More.

Underneath that, What to notify me about has three switches, or four if a bookkeeper on the Partner plan keeps your books:

• Email covers new email, and anything still waiting on a reply.
• Money covers an invoice being paid, a customer accepting a quote, and a remittance falling due.
• Receipts and bills covers a receipt finishing its scan, and bills arriving by email.
• Questions from your bookkeeper covers your bookkeeper asking you something about your books. Only an account whose books a bookkeeper on the Partner plan keeps has this switch.

Turning one off stops that kind of notification being sent, so it will not appear on any of your devices. The switches for one kind do not affect another.

Tapping a notification opens the thing it is about: an email opens that conversation, a paid invoice opens the invoice, captured bills open your bills list, and a question from your bookkeeper opens their questions. If the app is already open in another window, it moves that window to the right place rather than opening a second one.

When you read, archive or delete an email on the web or in the desktop app, the notification for it disappears from an Android phone and from Chrome, Edge or Firefox a few seconds later. A notification that covered several emails stays until all of them are dealt with. This applies to email notifications; a paid invoice or a scanned receipt stays until you tap or clear it.

On an iPhone, and in Safari on a Mac, it goes a little later: the next time a notification arrives, you tap one, or you open HQ. Apple shows a banner for everything HQ sends to those devices, so HQ cannot send one just to remove a notification without announcing the email again as you read it. It tidies up at those moments instead, when the device is already awake. The number on the app icon catches up at the same moments.

To keep an iPhone's icon number right straight away, turn on Badge when read elsewhere, under On this phone in More, Notifications. HQ then sends that iPhone an update when you deal with an email somewhere else, which removes the email's notification and resets the number. Apple requires every update to show something, so each one shows a quiet Inbox updated notification. Turn off Banners for TALISK_HQ in the iPhone's Settings first, or each update appears as a banner. You can also turn off Lock Screen and Notification Centre there and leave only Badges on.

HQ stays quiet while you are actually using the app. If you have the app in front of you when something happens, it appears on screen instead of as a notification.

If notifications stop arriving, check three things in order: the switch for that device under More › Notifications, the category switches under it, and then your phone's own notification settings for HQ, which can block them separately.

If HQ cannot read your settings, the switches show the defaults and say so, and they will not respond to a tap until it can read them again. That is deliberate: a switch that moves without saving is worse than one that waits.

The number on your phone's app icon

When HQ is on your phone's Home Screen and allowed to notify you, its icon shows a number: the unread conversations in the inbox of the email account you are in, the same number as the badge on Mail. It updates whenever a notification arrives and whenever you open HQ, so email you read on another device stops counting the next time either happens. Android phones do not show numbers on app icons; they show a dot while a notification is waiting.

How notifications appear is set by your phone, not by HQ. On an iPhone, open Settings, then Notifications, then TALISK_HQ. There you choose whether HQ notifications show on the Lock Screen, in Notification Centre and as banners, whether they play a sound, and whether the icon shows its number. To get only the number, turn off Lock Screen, Notification Centre and Banners, and leave Badges on.

TALISK_HQ appears in that list once you have turned on On this phone in More, Notifications, from the Home Screen icon, and allowed it when your phone asked.

In the desktop app

The HQ desktop app for Mac and Windows tells you about new email itself, so there is nothing to turn on under Notifications on this device. When an email arrives while the app is not in front, you get one notification with the sender and subject. When several arrive together they share one notification that says how many, and which account they came to. You will not get more than one every 30 seconds; anything that arrives in between is included in the next one.

The desktop app does not notify you about mail from a sender you have filtered, about mail you sent yourself, or about mail you have already read somewhere else. To silence one email account, turn off Notify on new emails on that account under Settings › Email. The Email switch under More › Notifications on your phone silences all of them, on every device.

The app icon in the Dock on a Mac, or on the taskbar in Windows, shows how many unread emails are in the inbox of the account you are in, the same number as the Inbox badge in the sidebar.

If desktop notifications never appear, check that your computer allows them: on a Mac, System Settings › Notifications › TALISK_HQ; on Windows, Settings › System › Notifications.