Tip of the Month for: April 2015
Customer Friendly B/O Status Report
Communicating information to your customers about the status of backordered items, especially customers who may have several large or special order items on backorder, can be a time-consuming process. Answers makes that process easier and more efficient by providing a B/O Status Report in a “customer friendly” format that can be generated and emailed to your customers (as a PDF). This report can actually generate for multiple customers at one time, and then send to each customer individually, saving you the time of creating each report individually.
The B/O Status report shows the Order #, Order Date, Customer P/O #, stock #, description,quantity on back order, optional vendor name, and the expected ship date. Expected Ship Dates are determines as they are other places in Answers by the Vendor Acknowledged Date if entered, or by the required date, or by the estimated lead time date. Each customer will receive a PDF document showing their company name and their back orders.
This report can be found on the Order Processing > Reporting > Open Order Reports menu.
To enable customers to be generated on the report, they must be set up with a recipient email address for this particular function. To define the email address, in Customer Maintenance, click the Setup Options tab, then click the Advanced button and enter the email address of the recipient. Only customers with a recipient address for the report will be generated when you run the B/O Status Report & Email option.
A range of customer numbers is available, however, keep in mind that only customers set up for this function will be generated on this report.
The Subject will used for the outgoing emails.
The Message field will be used as the body of the outgoing emails. The Email Notes Maintenance program can be used to set up a default message as well.
A preview report will be generated showing each customer that has been selected, along with the orders and information for each customer. There will be one page (or more as needed) for each customer.
Once the preview is Printed or Viewed on Screen (and you exit the viewer), the user will be prompted to Send the emails. This could take some time, as each customer’s individual report is converted to a PDF and then sent out via email.
This report can also be accessed through the B/O Status Review window of Customer Inquiry (Open Orders tab), the backorders review in Salesman Work Center, and the backorders review tab of the Executive Information Center.