Managing Invoices sent by Email - A status field for Sales Invoice screen

We have multiple people generating Sales Invoices and emailing. Now the emailed documents are beautifully recorded under the email tab and you can confirm what has been sent and when, great!

The challenge we have is the management of what Invoices / documents have been sent via email and what has not.

Is there a way the Sales Invoices Screen can show an “email” status field telling us what invoices have been emailed or not? We would love this to be automated.

99.99% of all our customers are emailed and this status flag could help us not double send documents or have them over looked and not sent at all.

Look forward to any suggestions that may help. Thank you.

in your Email Templates you can set the subject to include the invoice number.
this will allow you to check easily if an invoice has been emailed.

just add {{reference}} in the subject field.

while show an email status for invoices sounds like a good idea, this will not guarantee that the client has actually received the email. so this would be an unnecessary feature to be included.

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Thank you we have implemented those suggestions some years back. I guess the thing for us is the multiuser environment with increased business activity. Switching screens to check status is time consuming.
We understand the no guarantee with sent email but the status of emailed could indicate that the sales invoice has been completed and dealt with in its entirety as well. Maybe the sales Invoice lines could use colour as a status?

The difficulty, @compuit, is that different businesses process sales invoices in many ways. Some send by email, some by regular mail, some accompanying delivered goods. Some enter them via a customer’s supplier management portal and only generate them in Manager as a way of recording the transaction. Some create and send them before delivery, some after. So modifying the program to address your desire satisfies you, but not others, and may interfere with other workflows.

what I would suggest is that if the emails tab is enabled, this suggests to the program that people will be emailing invoices from within Manager.

Then on the sales invoices tab (which I presume is the only tab that will have emailed documents from), could have an email status column and the program could update this column when an invoice is emailed through Manager.

If you don’t use the email tab, then obviously this status column need not show. There could even be a filter option in Manager to not show this status column if you do not want this. This setting could be found in either the email tab or in settings. It’s all done by filters now - databases I mean.

Failing that, a solution could be to just create a column called Email Status and when people have emailed an invoice, they mark that invoice as emailed in the status column?

I would not presume that. What about, as a few quick examples:

  • Credit notes
  • Receipts for cash sales from locations without printers
  • Payments sent as payment advices
  • Sales quotes
  • Sales orders emailed internally to fulfilling departments
  • Purchase orders to suppliers
  • Goods receipts from the warehouse dock
  • Production orders to the shop supervisor
  • Payslips

Fair Point. I don;t use the email tab so I am not familiar with what people want to email. Anyway my point is that this email status field could be applied only when the email tab is enabled and can even be enabled selectively for different tabs.

Just a suggestion for the OP’s question

Exactly this need not be limited to Sales Invoices. However it is a pressure point in a multi user environment, for us if the Sales Invoice tab could give some status / feedback on whether emailed or not it would be fantastic.

Well you can create a custom column to do just that. I would recommend a solution integrated into the program, but a custom column would do the job for you.

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The trouble with that is that you will need to update the status after the event, in a fast environment users will not do this … If this does become a feature it will need to be automated as suggested by dalacor

Yes I agree with you. It’s not ideal. I have the same problem with my quotes tab. I have a custom column for quotes with the status open, closed, successful and lost business and I have to keep remembering to go into quotes to mark it after processing the invoice.

But I have been waiting over three years for the status of quotes to be implemented, so I created a custom column in the meantime until the feature is implemented. This is why I suggested this course of action for you as your request is similar to mine - a status field so is likely to take some time to implement as the developer will need to think how and if this feature is implemented.

Like you I would prefer an integrated feature, but that is the only option available for now.

Any further thoughts or consideration on this idea as an automated process?

I think I do…

How about batch custom field change status?

I was thinking along the line, tab like sales invoice have dedicated feature leads you to another page for emailing in batch (like checkboxes) that also indicates whether the email is sent successfully from manager.

After the batch email executed, the status will be shown in listing view of the said tab. However the issue might be the display wouldn’t be an ideal… too many things to list if you adding other custom fields.

I also want to add feature if this idea is realistic to lubos, adding an optional feedback if allow by receiver that shows the email has been read to defined email address.

Mozilla thunderbird has this function of feedback after the email has been open and allowed by receiver to notify back to sender.

Because Manager only sends emails on behalf of your email address, but is not a fully-featured email client in it’s own right, this analogy doesn’t quite work.

It is possible that Manager could request a read-receipt, as you are likely referring to, but any responses / confirmation to that read-receipt would appear in your actual email client (e.g. Mozilla thunderbird) and not in Manager.

Other options exist - such as what is referred to as a “pixel” that detects the email being opened - but that then relies on a server to host the image that is required for that to work, and therefore would not be compatible with the Desktop edition of Manager.

I agree that what you’re asking for would be nice to have, but in this case there are technical limitations :slight_smile:

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In my view the feature needs to simply update a field say under the “Sales Invoices” screen the moment the “send” button is used to email for example a Tax Invoice / Quote etc. No dependency on an email client is required. The “Email Status” under Sales Invoices could be demonstrated or viewed in a way similar to the current Sales Invoices Status field is shown with the use of colour, grey, orange, red and green…

image

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Just quietly wondering if this has been given any consideration as an idea?

No pushing in the queue! My idea is coming first :innocent:

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We use a custom field shown as a column. Not ideal but we have integrated it into our process and it is what it is. Works for us.

Yes we use a custom field as well for this purpose but a lot of extra clicking and everyone is not diligent in making manual changes.