Subscriptions — the basics
A subscription is SHIPM8's way of saying "when this happens, do that". It listens for something happening in the app — an event — and then runs one or more actions automatically, without anyone clicking a button.
Subscriptions are part of the event handler: the background mechanism that carries those events around SHIPM8. You'll hear both names for the same thing — the event handler is the machinery, a subscription is one rule you set up on it.
Open it from Sidebar → Admin → Content distribution → Subscriptions (the card is labelled Data export in Dutch). If your account also has the Manage events permission, the Admin page shows a separate Event handler card with the same link.
What it's for
Typical things people automate with a subscription:
- Send an invoice to the bookkeeping system the moment it's finalised.
- E-mail a confirmation to the customer when a record reaches a certain status.
- Fill in a field on a record automatically when a related record changes.
- Start an invoice flow when a job is completed.
- Pull data in from an external system when it sends a webhook.
- Warn an administrator by e-mail that something happened, so you can keep an eye on it.
The three parts of a subscription
Every subscription is built from the same three pieces:
- The event — when it should run. You name the event with a trigger identifier
(a short code like
$invoicing_invoice_finalized) and a trigger type. See Event types for the full list of what you can subscribe to. - The conditions — whether it should run this time. Optional. Conditions look at the data that came with the event and let the subscription continue only when they're satisfied. See Conditions.
- The actions — what should happen. One subscription can have several actions, and each has its own type and settings. See Event actions and Action types.
How it runs
It helps to know that this all happens in the background:
- Something happens in SHIPM8 — a record is saved, an invoice is finalised, a document is sent.
- SHIPM8 raises an event message that carries the record's data with it.
- The event handler looks for subscriptions in your organisation that match that event.
- For each match, the conditions are checked. If they don't hold, nothing happens.
- If they do, the subscription's actions run, one after another.
Because it's a background process, an action doesn't hold up the person who caused the event — they carry on working while the automation runs. It's usually a matter of seconds, but it is not instant, and the order in which two separate subscriptions run is not guaranteed.
All of a subscription's actions are attempted. If one fails, the others still run — the failure is recorded in the execution log rather than cancelling the rest. See Monitoring and troubleshooting.
What you can do
- Find a subscription — search and open existing subscriptions.
- Create a subscription — the event, the name, and the period it's active.
- Conditions — narrow down when the subscription should run.
- Event actions — add, edit and remove the actions.
- Action types — what each type of action does.
- Chaining events — let one action's result set off the next subscription.
- Event types — the index of everything you can subscribe to, by area.
- Monitoring and troubleshooting — checking that it worked, and what to do when it didn't.
This is an administrator area. Reaching the screen at all needs the Service connections permission, and so does creating or changing a subscription. The extra Event handler card on the Admin page appears only with the Manage events permission. If you can't see Subscriptions under Admin, ask your administrator.
A few buttons — Save, New, Add, Edit, Search — show in English even when the app is set to Dutch. This guide uses those English labels so they match your screen.
Trigger identifiers, field paths and action settings are exact, technical values. If you're setting up your first subscription, it's much quicker to sketch out what you want to happen and let SHIPM8 support fill in the codes with you than to guess them.