What triggers a notification

What appears in the bell

The bell shows items that require your personal attention:

@mentions — a colleague has written a note on a document and tagged you with @. This is the most common bell event.

Every bell notification also arrives as an email to your registered Nordflow address, so you see it even when you are not logged in. No setting needs to be changed; this is the default behaviour.

What does not appear in the bell

The bell is not a feed of all system activity. The following events are captured in the document’s activity history but are not pushed to your bell:

Another user approving or rejecting a document
OCR data extraction on a new document
Status changes you did not initiate

Bell vs Approval tab

The Approval tab shows documents waiting for your approval action in the flow. The bell shows documents where someone has flagged you specifically — including documents that are not in your approval flow at all. Both surfaces serve a different purpose and will often have different content.