Lesson 5 — Reminders, why yours did not fire, and the four messages
Most people install this module for one feature: something that appears before a document expires. It is also the feature most often reported as broken in the first month, and there is one documented reason for that, stated plainly in the user guide.
The click path. Go to Settings › Technical › Scheduled Actions and enable Licence Renewal Reminders. It runs daily. It ships switched off on purpose, so that installing a module never starts sending things on your behalf before you are ready — which is the right default, and also the reason your reminders were silent.
How a reminder arrives. Once the action is enabled, each licence raises an activity for its responsible user as each offset is crossed. It is an activity on the record, in the same place as every other activity that person has — not a separate inbox to remember to check, and not a notification that vanishes when the browser is closed.
Each offset fires once. Closing the activity does not bring it back, and a second run on the same day does not create a duplicate. That is deliberate and it is the right choice: a reminder that reappears every morning teaches people to close it without reading it, and by the third week nobody sees it at all. Four nudges that each mean something beat ninety that mean nothing.
Which puts real weight on the responsible user field. If an offset fires to somebody who has left the company, that nudge is spent — the module will not raise it again, and the next one is a month or more away. When somebody leaves, or changes role, walk the licence list and move the records they were responsible for. It takes a few minutes, and it is close to the only maintenance this module asks of you.
The four validation messages. These are the messages the module raises, and each one is telling you something specific. Read the middle column before you change anything, because three of the four are the module working correctly:
| Message | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| That licence number is already recorded | A live licence with that number already exists for that company and that type | Use Renew on the existing record instead of creating a new one |
| A licence expired but the status still says Active | The status refreshes when the dates change and when the daily action runs, and neither has happened yet | Enable the scheduled action, or edit and save the record to refresh it now |
| Only a draft licence can be activated | The record has already been activated, renewed or cancelled | Use Reset to Draft first, if that is genuinely appropriate |
| Licence type X requires a document before activation | The type has Requires Document set and no scan is attached | Attach the scan under Documents, or clear Requires Document on the type |
The second row deserves a sentence of its own, because it is the one people read as a bug. A status is a stored value, not a live calculation: it is refreshed when the record's dates change and when the daily scheduled action runs. If the action is off and nobody has touched the record, an expired licence can sit there showing Active indefinitely. Enabling the action fixes it permanently; opening the record and saving it fixes it right now.
Permissions, in one line. Licences: Manager is what a user needs in order to configure licence types, granted under Settings › Users. Recording and renewing licences does not require it; changing what a type means for everybody does.
Worked example. Cobalt Freight FZ-LLC finishes recording its four licences on a Thursday and hears nothing for six weeks. On investigation, the scheduled action had never been enabled — the records were correct the whole time, and the module was doing exactly what it ships doing. It is enabled that afternoon, the daily run starts, and the first activity to reach the office manager is on an establishment card nobody had thought about since it was filed.
The failure mode. "Reminders worked for months and then stopped for one licence." Check three things, in order: whether that licence is still Active rather than Renewed or Draft, whether its responsible user is still with the company, and whether the offsets on its type have all been crossed already. Each offset fires once, so a licence that has already spent all of its nudges is silent by design until it is renewed and a successor takes over.