We provide a complete characterisation of automaticity of uniformly recurrent substitutive sequences in terms of the incidence matrix of the return substitution of the underlying purely substitutive sequence. This resolves a recent question posed by Allouche, Dekking and Queffélec in the uniformly recurrent case. We show that the same criterion characterizes automaticity of minimal substitutive systems. Furthermore, we construct a minimal substitutive system whose maximal equicontinuous factor is the 2-adic odometer, and for which the corresponding factor map is everywhere uncountable-to-one. We conjecture that a minimal substitutive system is k-automatic if and only if it is an everywhere finite-to-one extension of a k-adic odometer.