An update
Quote from David Waldmann on 06/26/15 at 05:12:56:However, during more extensive testing we found it wasn't necessary to use the letter codes UNLESS there is a different person for one type of document than another. For instance, if you have a customer that has only one contact and/or one email address for the entire company, you can leave the Primary field as blank or Y, and still put your I or S in the print dialog. If there is no matching primary code it just uses the first email address it finds.
I don't know if the program was updated, but when we tried going live with it we found the above is NOT TRUE. If there is no matching Primary code it puts in the Auto email failure address (if you've set one up).
In preface, I should say that I had previously spent hours upon hours using Maintain Database to clean up duplicate Contacts (as many as 50 or more in some cases IIRC) and contacts assigned to the wrong company. I suppose the duplicates could probably have been eliminated with some script, and/or exporting and cleaning up in Excel, then reinitializing the table and reimporting, but you'd still have to find the bad links. It was pretty easy to find them among the duplicates, where almost all of them were.
So I spent most of a day selecting and exporting contacts (I used CR) and extensive use of Formulas and Subtotaling, Sorting and Filtering with Excel to prepare new files to import*.
- First separated those that get only invoices from those that also get statements.
- Then I assigned a value of 1 to any contact who had a Primary code that was blank or Y, and 10 to an I or S.
- I then Subtotalled by Customer ID.
- Any Invoice-Only customer with a 10 or higher already had an I and needed no more attention.
- Any Invoice-Only customer with a 0-9 didn't have an I, so I Replaced the Primary Code with an I
- On the Net customers, the ones with a 20 or higher already had both the I and S and needed no more attention.
- The Net customers with a 10-19 had one or the other. There were only about a dozen, so I manually went into AR-A and added the necessary contact.
- The Net customers with a 0-9 needed both, so I created a file with the necessary fields and Appended it to the contacts file.
The important thing is that I now have and "I" contact to send Invoices for everyone that has an email (or fax # that I've made into and email address), and all our Net X days customers also have an "S" contact for Statements.
The only thing I'm not real thrilled with is that I ended up Appending any additional contacts needed, so some customers (about 100) have a duplicate [blank] or [Y] contact in addition to the I and S ones. I'm sure I could run a script of some sort to clean them up, but it's not that big of a deal.
Anyways, I think I am finally there. We are using it today for Invoices, and Monday will be another big test with Statements.
BTW, I believe there were only about 10 Net X Day customers that we don't have a fax or email address for (and they are very low frequency), so I expect the USPS is going to be getting a LOT less of our $$.
Quote from David Waldmann on 06/26/15 at 05:12:56:We are in the process of doing away with our normal fax line because we are converting to Hosted PBX on VoIP. So we will be using an Fax-2-Email (F2E) service. It's really cool how it works for sending from Evo. You enter an email address to the Contact using their fax number, i.e. 19998887777@faxservice.com and it gets treated in Evo as if they have an email address. Evo sends the email with attachment and the F2E service converts the email header, subject and body as a cover page, and the attachment as content pages.
The receiver has no idea that it came from an email other than the fact that the bottom of the cover page has the name of the fax service on it. Note that if you have no subject or body in the email no cover page is sent, so if you send a lot you may want to set up a user that has a profile without that since the F2E services charge by the page (or - up to X pages). I like MetroFax at $8/month for up to 500 pages.
Per fellow user Burr King, I found out that if you put {nocoverpage} in your signature the F2E service eliminates the cover page. Pretty slick. Would be even slicker if Evo did HTML mail - you could make the text white so it couldn't be seen...
One last note. Probably most of you who've played with this already know, but for some reason I didn't figure it out until yesterday.
When you click Email in the print dialog the box comes up asking how you want to send the email. I was under the mistaken assumption that the "Use Contact Name" and "Use Contact Number" were only valid selections if "Auto Send Email" was checked off. They're not! So, you can still select "Use Contact Number" and put in the "I" or "S" but NOT check off "Auto Send". This will allow you to see what it wants to use, and make adjustments if necessary. So for now we are not going to Auto Send, until we've tested for a while and make sure it all works the way we expect it to.
Of course, now that we've gone through all that, they will probably enable the checkboxes...
*I used the T7GENIMP utility. A couple of tips - the only required fields for this purpose are Customer ID, Email Address and Primary Code. I also assigned a Contact of "Statement" to the S code contact and "Invoice" to the I code one. Two notes related to that -
- 1) the field for the Contact Name is BKCM.ACCN.CON, NOT BKCM.ACCN.CONT[array 1-10].
- 2) If you don't put in a Contact Name, or put it in .CONT[array*], Evo will assign "No Name X"...
Hope this helps someone have a bit less pain than me. If anyone has any questions about any of this, please let me know - I'd be glad to help.
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New contacts - how do they work? (Read 8257 times)
