A notification from a business process is a way to tell a person "something important happened, take a look": a deal has stalled, an invoice is awaiting approval, a request is overdue. Bitrix24 has several channels for this, with different cut-through — from a bell inside the portal to a message in an external messenger. Let's go over which actions to use, how to write texts that actually get read, and why notifications "don't arrive".
Which notification actions are available in processes and robots?
Four stock channels. Notify user — the portal bell: cheap, but drowns in the stream. Email — to an employee or a customer: for external recipients and official events. Chat message — livelier than the bell, especially in a department group chat where everyone sees the overdue item. Task — the strongest channel: a task has an owner and a due date and can't be "swiped away"; send anything that requires action as a task, not a notification. The rule of thumb: informing — the bell or chat, demanding action — a task, an external recipient — an email.
Who to send to: the recipient from the org structure, not from the template
A notification "to the head of sales" shouldn't contain a surname: people change, templates don't. The Get an employee's manager robot returns the responsible person's manager from the org structure — an escalation notification finds its recipient on its own, in any department. The same trick works for chains: the first reminder goes to the responsible person, a day later to their manager, another day later to the manager's manager (applying the robot twice). The recipient is "computed", and the process template stays untouched for years.
How do you write a notification that gets read?
The text is assembled from substitutions: document fields, variables, action results. Three rules. First — the fact and the action in the first line: "Deal #{ID} {Title}: quote with no response for 5 business days. Call the customer today" — not "Dear colleague, we would like to draw your attention…". Second — a link to the card is mandatory: the recipient must reach the deal in one click. Third — numbers, not assessments: "stalled for 12 days, amount 480,000" works better than "has been hanging around for a while". And don't send notifications about the normal course of things ("the process started successfully") — within a week people stop reading them, and the genuinely important ones drown.
How do you send a notification to an external messenger?
The designer has no stock "to Telegram" or "to a corporate messenger" action — this is done with an HTTP call to the messenger's API. The HTTP request robot sends a POST with the text to the bot's API: suitable when losing a single message isn't critical. For alerts that must arrive (a missed payment deadline, an integration failure), use the Reliable webhook — it retries the send while the receiver is unavailable, so the alert isn't lost to a minute-long network blip. Keep bot tokens in process constants, not in the body of the action.
Why don't notifications arrive? A checklist
If the recipient "got nothing", go in order. The notification went to someone else: the action specifies the process author or "the responsible person", who has since changed — check the recipient in the process log. The bell is off: the employee's personal notification settings are trimmed — for critical events duplicate with a task. The email didn't go out: mail sending isn't configured on the portal, or the employee's address is empty. The branch never reached the action: a condition higher up cut off the scenario — check the log for which steps actually ran. The external messenger is silent: the bot is blocked by the recipient or the token has expired — check the response code on the HTTP request, and switch critical alerts to reliable delivery.
Bottom line
A good notification system is the right channel (a task for actions, chat for the team, email for outsiders), the recipient from the org structure, facts with a link in the text, and guaranteed delivery for what's critical. The robots for this — manager by structure, HTTP request, reliable webhook — are in the Roboteka catalog: installing from the Market is free.