In Server Manager 17.7.41 when you view statements and then decide that you wish to attach a file to the particular statement with say some relevant correspondence relating to that statement. I find that, that particular attachment is applied / attached to every statement in your list. Before I update I would like to know if this issue has been resolved please?
I’m using update 17.7.95, Desktop version, and can confirm that a file attached to one customer’s statement will be attached to all the other customers’ statements.
The reason for this is that you are attaching the document to the Customer Statement report, which is not a particular customer’s statement. When you “create” a report for a customer, you are saving only the parameters of the report. The report itself is generated every time you view it. So there is, for example, no Customer Statement for Northwind Traders stored in the database with which an attachment can be associated.
It definitely is for a particular customer just like an invoice is for a particular customer. However if it cannot function in the same way as the Invoices or Purchase Invoices’ “New Attachment” button then I suggest the “New Attachment” button be removed from the Statement screen. It would be great if it worked in the way I think it was intended though.
It does function if you want to send a global attachment:
- Next months specials
- New product releases
- Holiday season opening hours
If the Customer Statement report could be per customer selected, then per customer attachment would function.
You are not correct, @compuit. A sales or purchase invoice is always for a specific instance of activity with a specific customer or supplier. A customer statement is created fresh each time in one of two ways:
- Unpaid invoice type statements are generated on the fly after the customer or supplier is named and as of the current date.
- Transaction type statements store only the date range and customer/supplier name, not the statement report. Thus, the statement itself is also generated on the fly.
So any attachment you make is to the underlying structure of the report, not to a specific customer or supplier statement, because such documents do not exist until generated again by being viewed.
Emailed forms and reports do not include attachments, even when those attachments are stored with an original document. So while a global announcement or advertisement could very well be the sort of thing you want to attach to the Customer Statement report, it would not go out when emailing the report. Several have requested that capability, but it has not yet appeared.
Out of curiosity, of what use are attachments to Customer Statements? What kind of file would it benefit a user to attach to the Statements?
We manage projects rolling out PC infrastructure at different factory sites over the whole country. The statement as you know gives the collection of invoices for a particular period. Now we have a PDF or Excel sheet which breaks down the detail of each project for the period in terms of Labour, Accommodation, Expense and other components. Now this is where we believed it would be great to have the PDF attached. The reasoning for this is should their be a query for that period the person taking the call will have every relevant piece of detail for that time frame in question in front of them. Pulling this information up by taping on the attachment has proved valuable to our organisation because of its ease and speed particularly when working on mobile devices iPhone and iPads. Our work around has been to attach the PDF to each invoice relating to the project. Not so economical.
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I like to attach the original INVOICE to Customer Statements so that the customer receives full documentation without having to search for the original invoice.
Tut,
the latest version of Manager seems to have removed the ability to ATTACH a document to Reports, eg Customer Statement. I find this limiting as we used to always accompany a Statement with the original Invoice that has not been paid.
Is there another avenue for attaching a document to an individual customer statement?
Further, the Manager Guides needs updating for this recent version.
taken from your Guides:
Add an attachment
Click View to see any transaction form in Manager. Add an attachment to the transaction by either of two methods:
Click New Attachment at the bottom of the page. Browse to the file you want to attach and select it according to normal procedures for your operating system.
Drag and drop the attachment onto the form while you are viewing it.
In the illustration below, a spreadsheet file has been attached to a sales quote:
To my knowledge, you have never been able to attach documents or files to reports, only to forms. Forms are things like invoices, receipts, and so forth, where you enter financial transactions. Reports are summary presentations of the results of forms. A customer statement is a report, not a form, so you cannot attach a file to it.
The Guide on attaching supporting documentation correctly describes operation of the program.
Yes it has been removed because the
and did not work quite as expected.
@compuit, the issue you and @MicheleA have raised is apparently going to require more explanation than I gave in my brief answer to her. The core of the explanation, however, has previously been provided in earlier postings to this thread.
As I said in post #12, you’ve never been able to attach files to reports themselves. It might have seemed like you could, but you couldn’t, because reports don’t actually exist in Manager. As I explained it post #6, Manager only stores parameters that define a report, not the report itself. In other words, while you might define a customer statement for a specific time period and customer, there is no document or web page to attach a link to for a supporting document. That is crucial, because Manager also doesn’t store attachments as part of a transaction form; it only stores links to them. So, if there is no form, there can be no hyperlink, so there can be no attachment.
The reason this has now become obvious is because the two types of statements, Unpaid invoices and Transactions, are now separate reports rather than variations on a single report as they used to be. While the results of a report look very similar, the underlying structure for how they are put together has actually been modified quite a bit. As I understand things, the interim form where attachment links could formerly be lodged no longer exists. That previous structure, by the way, is why attachments showed up for all statements, not just the customer’s or supplier’s where you wanted them. And, of course, that very issue is why you personally started this topic back in August 2017. You didn’t like it then, because the program did not behave as you expected. Problems like that were among the contributing factors behind redesign of the statements feature. Now, you seem to want the old behavior back, despite the fact that it never did what you wanted.
I believe you misunderstand what was originally intended. I think it has always worked as intended. But there were some side behaviors that were not intuitive and no longer cause problems because of the redesign.
I discovered the issue in similar manner as @MicheleA. I found the feature not working so it is preferable that the attach file option has been removed at this point. As you @Tut have pickup the issue applies to any attachment albeit Invoices or other documentation.
Can you clarify what you mean by this?
I come back to the loss of attachments to Customer Statements.
The previous version of Manager did have this facility and was very very useful to be able to attach a saved PDF of an invoice or a letter or anything from other sources to remind late paying Customers of their obligatory debt.
I do like the Transactions and Unpaid Invoices choice of Customer Statement.
Is there any way that the Unpaid Invoices could add INTEREST penalties as a column or aggregate to explain the difference between Sale amount and Balance? Ie another column beside the No. Days Overdue column.
@MicheleA, the only way you could attach documents to statements was a bug which was promptly fixed but you might have been using just that version.
As for the late payment fees showing on the statement, there are some improvements I’m planning to it so I’ll keep your suggestion in mind.
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Thanks Lubos.