Sending automatic invoice and delivery note emails

Breww can be configured to automatically email invoices to your customers when you invoice or complete an order/delivery. You can also manually email these documents to your customers.

In both cases, Breww will need to know which email addresses to use. For manually sent documents, these emails will become the default in the form, and you’ll have the option to amend them before pressing send.

Which email addresses will be used?

Breww decides who to email by looking for email addresses that carry the right tag. Tags are what tell Breww “this address should receive this type of document” - an email address without the relevant tag will normally be skipped.

There are two tags that matter here:

Both tags can be applied to the organisation’s primary email address and to any contact that has a primary email address, so a single document can go to several people at once.

The order Breww works through

For the document being sent, Breww builds a list of recipients like this:

1. Orders imported onto a shared customer account. If the document is an invoice or delivery note for an order that came in from an ecommerce/sales integration, and that order sits on a shared customer account, Breww uses only the email address that came through on the order itself and stops here. None of the steps below apply. See What about imported orders on shared customer accounts? below.
2. The customer’s own primary email address, but only if the customer record itself carries the relevant tag. An untagged primary email address is not added at this step.
3. The customer’s contacts, for each contact that carries the relevant tag and has a primary email address.
4. The parent company. If the customer belongs to a parent company, Breww then applies exactly the same tag rules to the parent company: the parent’s own primary email address is added if the parent’s record carries the tag, and each of the parent’s contacts is added if that contact carries the tag. Any addresses found are added to the list and shown as coming from the parent company. If the parent company itself has a parent company, Breww keeps going up the chain in the same way.
5. Duplicates are removed, so an address that appears more than once is only emailed once.
6. Fallback. If, after all of the above, the list is still completely empty, Breww falls back to the customer’s own primary email address - even though it isn’t tagged - so that the document isn’t left unsent.

Note: The fallback in step 6 applies only to the customer the document is for, never to a parent company. This means a parent company’s email address is only ever used if it (or a contact on it) carries the relevant tag. An untagged email address on a parent company is never emailed.

Note: Because the fallback only fires when the list is completely empty, a tagged address on the parent company will stop it firing for the customer. So if a customer has no tagged addresses of its own but its parent company does, the documents go to the parent company’s tagged addresses and not to the customer’s own untagged primary email address. If you want both to be emailed, add the tag to the customer’s address too.

What about imported orders on shared customer accounts?

If an invoice or delivery note email is being sent for an order that was imported from an ecommerce/sales integration and this order has been imported to a shared customer account, then Breww will send the email to the email address associated with the imported order only and will not follow the rules above (which look purely at the customer and so may be incorrect).

A shared customer account may be used for integration orders where the platform didn’t give us a customer reference (e.g. guest checkouts) or if you have chosen settings to put all orders onto a single customer account.

You can prevent emails from being sent for orders on shared customer accounts by setting the “Automatically email invoices” option to “Never automatically send”, just like any other customer account. See below for more on this option.

Adding a tag to a contact

Here’s a guide on how to add this tag to a contact:

Enabling automatic emailing

You can configure this for invoices in Settings → Invoice settings.

And for delivery notes in Settings → Email settings (in the “Delivery notes” section).

It’s also possible to set on a per-customer basis if you’d like the customer to follow your account-wide setting for automatic invoice emailing, or to override your account default:

You can also customise the email template in Settings → Email settings page to match your own unique style.

Troubleshooting

Why didn’t my customer receive the email?

Work through these in order:

1. Is automatic emailing switched on? Check your account-wide setting, and the customer’s own override, as described in Enabling automatic emailing above.
2. Does the address you expected carry the right tag? For invoices and credit notes, look for Receives invoice emails; for delivery notes, look for Receives delivery note emails. An untagged address is only ever used as a last-resort fallback.
3. Does the contact have a primary email address set? A tagged contact with no primary email address contributes nothing.
4. Does the customer belong to a parent company with tagged addresses? If so, the fallback won’t fire, and the customer’s own untagged address won’t be used. Tag the customer’s address as well.
5. Did the order come from an integration onto a shared customer account? If so, only the email address on the order itself is used.

Why did the email go to the parent company instead of the customer?

This is the fallback rule in action. Breww only falls back to an untagged address when it has found no tagged addresses at all. If the parent company has a tagged address but the customer doesn’t, the list isn’t empty, so the fallback doesn’t happen and only the parent company is emailed.

To email both, add the relevant tag to the customer’s own primary email address (or to a contact on the customer). To email the customer only, remove the tag from the parent company’s address and its contacts - an untagged parent company address is never used.

FAQs

What’s the difference between the Organisation and Contacts?

The Organisation is where you’d add general company contact details, such as '[email protected]'. The Contacts are for individuals within the company.

In the screenshot above, accounts@ and info@ would receive invoice emails due to their tags.

How do I send a proforma invoice email?

Proforma invoices cannot be automatically sent by Breww; however, you will be able to send these manually from Breww by selecting PDF -> Email to customer. You will then be able to set the **Document type to generate **option to Proforma invoice. If you would like to export the PDF, you will be able to select PDF -> View proforma invoice.

Do account statements and credit notes follow the same rules?

Yes. Account statements, credit notes and supplier purchase orders all use the same recipient rules, using the Receives invoice emails tag.

How does the {{ business_name }} template variable work?

The {{ business_name }} variable, which you can use in your email templates, resolves using the following chain:

1. If the order's invoicing details have a Send from name override set, that value is used.
2. Otherwise, if a Send from name is configured in your brewery-wide Settings → Email settings, that value is used.
3. If neither is set, your Breww account name is used.

The display name shown in the “From” header of outgoing emails follows the same resolution chain, so the sender name your customers see in their inbox will always match the {{ business_name }} used in the email body.

This is particularly useful for multi-business setups. Each set of invoicing details can carry its own send-from name override, so emails for different trading entities automatically use the correct name without needing separate email templates for each entity.