How can I automate emailing invoices to my customers?
| Date: | 22 August 2003 |
|---|---|
| Product/Release: | LANSA for the Web |
| Abstract: | How can I automate emailing invoices to my customers? |
| Submitted By: | LANSA Technical Support |
| Last Review: | November 2010 |
Question:
We've been a LANSA shop for many years now. Today we manually sort and fax a certain list of customers their invoices. It is a time consuming process. We'd love to be able to do this easily within LANSA and not have to introduce other vendors, servers, technologies. I believe in LANSA we can read our ERP data and format onto a report (invoice) and forward to customer email address.
I'd like to automate our nightly invoices and could set up a control file to maintain those customers requiring email copy of invoice and select the data right from ERP system. What would you suggest the best approach for invoice formatting, what we know today is to painstakingly manually redefine each line. If we had a requirement to put our company logo on this email report, how could that be handled?
Answer:
There certainly are some good LANSA-powered options for you.
If you're already comfortable in LANSA for the Web, creating a reasonably formatted invoice using LANSA for the Web should not be overly difficult. To transmit this to the customer, you'd auto-generate (perhaps at night-end or by trigger when an invoice is cut) an e-mail (using the e-mail related BIFs) informing the customer that a new invoice exists, and providing the URL that will take them straight into the Web function to see the new invoice (or show a list of their invoices with the newest at the top, and have a drill-down capability to see the invoice details). If you expect users to print their invoices, this would be a browser-print ... so although including logos/tables/fonts is simple, printout-pagination does require special consideration as some browsers handle pagination directives differently.
The development of this application is not very difficult. The key will be in establishing & maintaining an e-mail address and Web-password for each customer, and their preference for receiving invoices etc. This is not a new challenge, rather something every business faces when they first Web-serve existing customers. Each business may handle this differently. Some will force users to register (sometimes online, sometimes with written signatures) for Web-access, at which time e-mail id and initial password are captured and recorded. Some already know a piece of 'secret' information about their customer that can be used to generate an initial password. Some random-generate an initial password and include it in a memo sent along with the next paper-mailed invoice. Maintaining a password and e-mail id is something you'll typically want to push to your customers as part of the Web-application (i.e. you don't want calls to Customer Service asking to change a customer's e-mail id).
As an alternative to LANSA for the Web, LANSA Professional Services has built solutions for our clients in the Americas which dynamically generate PDF documents (merged with data), which can be sent via e-mail. The solution is based on a custom-built LANSA Integrator service. The generated PDF can include any image/logo or bar-codes etc, and can be encrypted and password protected if required.
A demo exists at http://services.lansa.com/cgi-bin/lansaweb?procfun+integrator+pdfdemo+lpr+eng. This solution is password protected.
