Emailing Invoices and Quotes

Are you tired of stuffing envelopes?  Are you tired of paying for paper and envelopes and stamps and ink?  So why are you still printing and mailing invoices?  With ESC, you can email invoices to your customers in seconds - and it won't cost a thing!  You can also easily send them Quotes, Credits and Statements.  

Before you can email anything out of ESC, you'll need to make sure your outgoing mail settings have been entered.  If you have not done this already, please see our article Setup Email in ESC.

Emailing a Single Invoice, Quote or Credit Memo

1. First, you'll need to open the transaction you wish to email to your customer.

• To send an Invoice, open the customer's Invoice in the Sales Invoicing screen.
• To send a Quote, you'll open the Quote in the Enter Quotes screen.
• To send a Credit Memo, you'll open it in the Enter Credit Memo screen.

On the Activities toolbar, locate the Email button and click on it to open the Send Email screen.

When the Send Email screen opens, the transaction you had open on the screen will automatically appear at the bottom as a PDF attachment.

• The primary location (Location 00001) created with the customer record will always stay with that record.  They cannot be separated.  This is because the Contact information section for Location 00001 is attached to the Billing address on the General tab.  
• Every email address in a location's Contact panel has an Email Task field.  Email Tasks are ESC's way of determining what that email address is to be used for.  If set to "General", that email will not be used for any Sales transactions and will only receive status notifications and email blasts from other areas of ESC.  If set to "Billing", then that address will only receive Sales information, such as invoices, quotes and statements.  If set to "All", that email address will be used for all email communications.  
  
  
  
  
• The email addresses that show in the To field when emailing a transaction are determined by the billing party chosen for that transaction.  For instance, a customer may have multiple locations can have different contact information for each address; but if an invoice is being billed to the main customer, then only the email addresses from Location 00001 will appear available.  To use an email address from a different location, the Bill To information on that invoice will need to be changed to that location.
  
  
  
  
• If more than one email address exists in the customer's location record that have an Email Task of "All" or "Billing", then each of those addresses will appear in the To field and will be separated by a semi-colon.  You can select just one of those addresses by clicking the drop-down arrow to the right of the field.
  
  
  
  

You'll want to further compose your message to the customer by filling in the Subject and Body of the Send Email screen with the information you want the customer to see.  This information can be setup and automatically populated each time by setting up an Email Template.  See the Email Templates section for more information.

If you need to attach additional files, you can do so by clicking on the Insert File (paperclip) icon on the Send Email toolbar.  A Windows Explorer window will appear that allows you to navigate to the file that needs to be attached.

You will also have the option to 'Request a Read Receipt' so that you can be sure the recipient has not only received, but also read your message.  You'll do this by clicking on the Options button on the toolbar. The Read Receipt will be sent to the From address in the Send Email screen.

Email Templates

A Template allows you to setup the Send Email window once and reuse that setup every time a transaction is sent from ESC.  Saving a Template will save the following fields:

• Carbon Copy (Cc)
• Blind Carbon Copy (Bcc)
• From
• Subject
• The Body

To create a new template...

1. Pull up a random invoice, credit or quote and click the Email button to get to the Send Email screen.
2. Fill out the information that you want saved into the template (From, Subject, Body, etc.).
   
   
3. Click Save Template on the toolbar.
4. Give your template a name.
   
   
   
   
5. Select whether this template will be available to all users or to just you.  You can also choose to make this template the default for your user.  If you make this template your default template, then it will appear automatically every time an email is sent through this same screen.
   
   
   
   
6. Click OK.  

If you do not wish to actually send this email, you can now click the X at the top-right corner of the screen to exit the Send Email screen.  If you create multiple templates, you'll be able to select them from the Templates drop down menu on the toolbar.  Every user can setup their own default template so that the correct Reply address is used for that user each time they send an email.