DailyBrief — Staff Daily Digest for Perfex CRM

Important: DailyBrief is a module that runs inside Perfex CRM — not a standalone application. You need an existing install of Perfex — Powerful Open Source CRM to use it.

DailyBrief — the morning email your Perfex CRM was missing

DailyBrief sends a personalized daily digest to every staff member with their overdue tasks, today’s tasks, open tickets, pending leads, and calendar events — plus a separate Manager Brief with four executive KPIs. No external API, no SaaS subscription, no Twilio, no AI service. If your Perfex installation sends email today, DailyBrief works out of the box.

Every support team, sales team, and consultancy that runs Perfex hits the same wall: staff log in, browse five different sections, forget the lead they should have followed up, miss the task that became overdue overnight. Managers run no daily KPI report because building one manually takes 20 minutes a day. Existing marketplace options send a single generic report to everyone, ignore Perfex’s permission system, or require monthly fees for a relay service that should be local. DailyBrief delivers all of it — per-staff personalization, executive KPI brief, native Perfex stack, single one-time price.

Why DailyBrief is different

• Strict per-staff permission scoping. Every query goes through Perfex’s native permission APIs. A support agent never sees the CEO’s pipeline. A project manager never sees another team’s overdue tickets. No “send everyone the same report” anti-pattern.
• Separate Manager Brief. Managers receive a dedicated executive digest with four KPIs that actually matter: overdue invoices with multi-currency breakdown, total open tickets by priority, new leads in the last 24 hours, and total overdue tasks company-wide. Not the same brief as the staff — the right brief for the role.
• Empty-brief suppression. If a staff member has nothing pending, DailyBrief does NOT send an email. Most modules spam “you have 0 tasks today” daily and train people to ignore the digest. DailyBrief stays silent until there is something worth saying.
• Native Perfex everything. Cron hooks into after_cron_run. Emails use the SMTP already configured in Setup > Email Settings. Templates registered in tblemailtemplates are editable from the Perfex native UI — no PHP edits needed for branding.
• Test mode that is actually safe. A live banner across every module page when ON, a forced redirect of every brief to a single test address, and a “Send test brief now” button with five-state feedback (idle / sending / success / partial / error). Safe to enable on a production install.
• Self-hosted, source included. No external API calls, no telemetry, no data leaves your server. Install once and own it.

What’s inside

Dashboard

• 4 KPI cards: Briefs sent today, Staff receiving briefs, Next scheduled run, Failed in last 7 days
• Live module status pill (ACTIVE / PAUSED) so the admin knows the state without opening Settings
• Cron-stale warning banner when the last cron tick is > 28 hours old (alerts before silent delivery gaps)
• Test Mode banner across the page when redirection is active — no accidental production sends
• Recent deliveries preview table with deep links to the full log
• Onboarding panel for fresh installs — guides the admin to first brief in under 3 minutes

Staff Brief email

• One personalized email per active staff member, every morning, in the configured delivery window
• Five sections, each rendered only if it has content: overdue tasks, tasks due today, open tickets, pending leads, today’s calendar events
• Every item is a deep link straight into the corresponding Perfex record — one click to act
• Responsive HTML tested in Gmail desktop and mobile, Outlook 2019/365, Apple Mail, Yahoo Mail
• Editable from Setup > Email Templates — rebrand the header, intro copy, footer text without touching PHP

Manager Brief email

• Sent separately to staff selected in Settings — the right people get the executive view
• Four KPI cards: overdue invoices (multi-currency breakdown), total open tickets by priority, new leads in last 24h, total overdue tasks company-wide
• Same delivery window as the Staff Brief but a distinct template so managers can style it differently

Delivery Logs

• Server-side DataTable with every brief sent, skipped, or failed — full audit trail
• Filters: date range, status (sent / failed / skipped), brief type (staff / manager), staff member
• Per-row detail modal: recipient email, full subject, sections count, items total, generation time in milliseconds, and the exact error_message on failures (no more “Test failed” without context)
• One-click “Purge logs older than 90 days” for data hygiene
• Scales to thousands of staff × 365 days without slowing the page (server-side pagination, indexed by date)

Staff Preferences

• Server-side DataTable listing every active staff member with a per-row enable / disable toggle
• Bulk Enable / Disable all with confirmation
• Last delivery timestamp per staff so the admin sees who actually received their brief
• AJAX-saved — no full page reload to flip a toggle

Settings

• Master switch (Enable DailyBrief)
• Delivery time picker: any hour from 05:00 to 12:00
• Weekdays-only toggle: skip Saturday and Sunday automatically
• Manager Brief recipients multiselect (bootstrap-select with overlay dropdown — works on every viewport)
• Test Mode toggle + Test recipient email + Send test brief now button
• Sticky save bar with dirty-form detection — never lose unsaved changes

Security & reliability

• CSRF-protected AJAX on every action (native CodeIgniter token, no double-validation hacks)
• html_escape() on every dynamic value rendered in views and email partials
• CodeIgniter Query Builder only — zero raw SQL with interpolated variables
• 2-tier permissions: view (dashboard + logs) and manage (settings, preferences, send test)
• Idempotent installer (safe to re-activate), clean uninstaller (drops only the 2 module tables and the 2 email templates — your Perfex data stays intact)
• No external API calls, no telemetry, no third-party JS bundled (only what Perfex already loads)

Internationalization

• English + Spanish language packs (168 strings each, strict parity)
• Every UI string runs through Perfex’s _l() helper — ready for community translation
• Full UTF-8 with em-dash defensive repair at read time — zero mojibake even on legacy latin1 databases

How it scales

DailyBrief’s runner processes recipients sequentially with a 200 ms inter-send sleep, preventing SMTP throttling on shared hosting. A failed send for one staff member never aborts the batch — the runner logs the error and continues. Even a 200-staff install completes a full delivery pass in under one cron tick.

Live demo

URL: https://onboarding.ticempresarial.com/demo2/admin
Email: admin@demo.com
Password: 14789632

Log in, open DailyBrief → Dashboard, inspect the KPI cards and the recent deliveries preview. Go to Settings, enable Test mode with your own email, click “Send test brief now” and check your inbox. Open Delivery Logs to see the audit trail with click-to-expand detail per row. The demo is pre-seeded with realistic content (tasks, tickets, leads, events, invoices) so the brief you receive is non-trivial.

Requirements

• Perfex CRM 3.0.0 or later (tested up to 3.4.1)
• PHP 7.4 / 8.0 / 8.1 / 8.2 / 8.3
• MySQL 5.6+ or MariaDB 10.0+
• PHP extensions: json, mbstring (both standard)
• A working SMTP configuration in Setup > Email Settings
• Perfex cron enabled (every 15–30 minutes recommended) for automatic morning delivery

Support

Direct author support included for 6 months: bug fixes, install help, configuration questions. Submit a ticket via Envato or email us directly.

What’s NOT in v1.0 (transparency)

DailyBrief v1.0 is intentionally focused on the core morning-digest loop. The following are on the roadmap for v1.1+:

• In-app email template editor with live preview (currently editable via Setup > Email Templates)
• Per-staff individual delivery time (every staff currently shares the global delivery window)
• Weekly Brief mode (Monday summary of the previous week)
• Digest HTML preview inside the admin without sending

If any of these is critical for your workflow, contact us before purchasing — we will tell you straight whether the upcoming release will cover it or whether you should wait.

Why we built this

We run a CRM consultancy. The most common complaint from our Perfex clients after the first month of use is “my staff just don’t open Perfex first thing — they wait until something is on fire”. Every alternative was either a SaaS that wanted to ingest customer data, an overpowered marketing automation suite that costs more than the CRM itself, or a Perfex addon that promised digests but only delivered a single hardcoded report to everyone. We built DailyBrief — the morning briefing tool we wanted to deploy for every client, but couldn’t find.

DailyBrief is a community-built add-on for Perfex CRM. We are not affiliated with Perfex Ltd.