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Sept 20, 2006 Start Thinking Outside of the Box As members of the accounting and information technology teams, sometimes we just get used to doing things one way. I am starting a new ezine series to present ideas for doing tasks differently and getting better results. Take a minute and read this short article and see if it makes sense to evaluate this change at your company? Problem: Invoicing, AR Statements, Sales Acknowledgement copies, and/or PO acknowledge copies are typically printed and then mailed If you are in the business of selling a product or service, you are undoubtedly creating lots of paper for the invoicing and statement tasks. If you’re using the Order Management modules, you probably have additional paper being printed and distributed. Examples of documents, which might be printed and mailed are: order acknowledgement and purchase order confirmation. The way Solomon was designed, was to process these documents as a batch, printing several forms concurrently. When we do this, we do not have the ability to create single export files which map to the individual document. This problem is further complicated by the difference in the number of pages that the document might run. For instance, some invoices might print out in one page, while other invoices print out as multiple pages. Hence with the standard Solomon crystal documents/ reports, you do not have a good solution for exporting individual documents to files which could be emailed. When we are sending our invoices to our customer via the US mail, we are building delays into our company’s cash flow. Because of the lag time in mailing, it may be at least 3 to 6 days before some our invoices actually get to our customers. This delay translates into increased Days Sales Outstanding, which is a good measurement tool for monitoring turnover of our Account Receivable dollars. Besides the delays associated with using US Mail, to transmit paper Invoice, Statements etc. , there is the cost to create the documents, stuff the envelopes, and mail the paper. It is estimated that you are spending $0.45 to $.55/document for the hard costs of printing the document, envelop costs, and a stamp. In addition, you have soft cost for your labor to stuff and mail the documents. Clearly the world has gone digital. Emails are a cornerstone for business and personal communications. Read on to see how you can start emailing your documents from Solomon and start saving money for your company. Solution: Emailing documents from Solomon Expand your capabilities with Solomon to including generating emails from Solomon to Outlook of individual Solomon documents, such as invoices, acknowledgements, and purchase order and customer statements. Bring the two common tools of Outlook and Solomon together for improved productivity of your accounting department. Benefit from the speed and lower cost of using emails instead of snail mail document distribution. Wow…. A concept much tool long in the coming for Solomon. Accounting System Integrators is a developer of Solomon adds on products. They have a series of modifications which require the Solomon customization manager. Using this customization tool, they have tightly integrated their program to allow emailing with attachments (i.e. invoices, statements, acknowledgement, or purchase orders). Their solution does not require that you have a special server, because it runs off the local Outlook Client. At the time of transmission, you can define if the end user is going to get an email or a printed copy of the document. There is an archive option for saving the attachments which are sent with the email, for later reference. There is a simple setup process for the ASI emailing, which defines the default formats for the Solomon documents. Using Crystal the standard formats can be easily modified to customer requirements and customer logo’s and terms. The transmittal email uses a simple template which is user definable. Long email addresses (up to 100 characters) and multiple people’s email addresses are supported. Design your Solomon document so that this can be a customer specific attachment routed to the email address for this customer. Here is an example of an invoice pdf file that was emailed as an attachment. It looks just like the standard invoice that you might print out.
Another common use of this program, is to email a customers AR statement to them on a monthly basis. CALL TO ACTION: I invite you to attend a webinar demonstration for this product. We have two sessions set up: September 28th at 9 AM PST or September 28th at 1 PM PST Lasting approximately 45 minutes
Please send me an email at this address so we can provide the webinar link and phone number for the session jcozens@systematicsol.com
or call me at 866 455-9876 Please provide us with this information: name, title, company, business phone, business email address.
Anyone who places an order and installs the software by October 31, 2006, will
be eligible Start planning for your next round of COST Savings for 2007!!!
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