E-Blast

E-Blast (Mass Emailing) provides a simple tool allowing your company to better utilize some of the contact information already available with your software. Basically, this form allows you to access either customer or vendor contact information for the purposes of sending a plain-text email with one attachment (required). This can be used to send an email message to many different contacts at the same time. All contact addresses associated with the email are done as BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) recipients to protect their privacy. Because a limited number of (email) addresses may be stored with any given email record, a single message may be split into batches. The number in each batch may vary due to the varying lengths of the addresses.

E-Blast

Selection

Accounts or vendor contacts can be selected by two different methods. There are three radio buttons in the upper left-hand corner of the form labeled: accounts, vendors, and custom. The accounts and vendors selections offer basic selection options similar to what you would find on reports that involve either customers (accounts) or vendors. With the "accounts" selection, you have the ability to choose from either the POS (Point of Sale) Contact (from the job #0 record) or the AR Contact (from the "master" or "main" account record). The custom option allows you to specify additional criteria based on a choice of field selections, operators, and values. For example, you could use the "custom" option to only select customers who have a credit limit > 0 and a last sale date greater than the end of the prior year. As many "custom" conditions may be added as you need.

Selection (Account)

The account-job selection panel typically offers four (4) radio buttons: by account, by class, by user ID, and all accounts. More than one selection choice may be used at the same time and doing so will typically provide a smaller quantity of results. When any of the four (4) selection options has criteria specified, a check box is displayed to the right of the radio button. The current selection (radio button) determines which fields are displayed in the area of the panel to the right. For example, when the "By Account" radio button is the active selection, fields for specifying an account number or range are shown.

Reporting_Selection_Account_General

By Account

This allows selection for either a single account or a range of accounts. If you want to limit the report to a specific job and account, use the "Job #" option instead. Account selection should either be done either from this option (By Account) or from the "Job #" option, not both. Accounts are selected based on the alpha-numeric values of the account identifier in ascending order. Some companies may use numeric account numbers; however, regardless of whether the actual account is numeric or not, the value is always treated as alpha-numeric (because alpha characters are allowed whether your company uses them or not). For this reason, accounts are always sorted "alphabetically" rather than numerically (the left-most character position is sorted first followed by the next position moving from left to right). For example, if you enter a starting range of "1" and an ending range of "1999," any accounts beginning with a digit other than "1" will not be included (the values: 2, 30, and "000722" would not be part of the selection even though they would fall numerically within the range).*

For ranges, the upper text area (drop down) is the lower range value and the bottom area is for the upper or higher range value (in ascending order 0-9, A-Z). The form won't allow you to enter an invalid range. Additionally, it is not possible to specify an upper (bottom) range without also a lower (top) range. For a single account, enter the account ID in the upper text area only.

*For this reason, we strongly advise that account numbers be the same length in characters and if numeric values are being used, we advise padding any numbers with leading zeros (on the left) such as "000089" instead of "89" to maintain a consistent length and to force accounts to be sorted the same as their numeric sort order would indicate.

By Class

Class selection may also be used to build a list of customer accounts for reporting and other purposes. One customer class code may be selected from the drop down. Classes can be used for grouping certain types of customers together. Customer class is an optional classification tool that may be used along with accounts. This feature involves defining codes that maintain a description and then assigning them to customer accounts (jobs don't have a class code assigned to them). If you add selection criteria based on customer class, only accounts assigned to that class code will be included in the selection.

By UserID

The "By UserID" selection option only includes accounts where the "assigned" sales person (Account Maintenance, Codes tab, Salesperson field) matches your selection. An option (check box) for "Current User ID" is also provided.

All Accounts

The "all accounts" option allows selection by account type (Cash-only, Charge, Retail* and/or Rent to Own*). Users can check one or more when using account type as a selection method. Due to the nature of this option, a large number of account records will be returned if it's used on its own, so it is best to only use this selection with one of the other 3 options.

*Note that the "Retail (Revolving Charge) and Rent to Own (Hire Purchase)" options will only be visible if those features are turned on in Parameters. The "Rent to Own" terminology is customizable, therefore your captions may differ from what is shown in the example below.

All Accounts

Selection (Vendor)

This control, primarily used with reporting, provides several options for vendor selection. Currently, four (4) options, selected by using the radio buttons, are provided: vendor (or range), type, class, and all vendors. The current selection determines which fields are displayed in the area of the panel to the right. For example, when the "By Vendor" radio button is the active selection, fields for specifying an vendor code or range of codes are shown.

Reporting_Selection_Vendor_ByVendor

By Vendor

Vendors may be selected individually by specifying or selecting the vendor's code in the upper text-area. It's also possible to specify a range of vendors. The range is defined by the values in both the upper and lower text areas (drop downs). The lower value must be specified in the upper text area ("Vendor Code") and the higher value in the lower text area ("or Range"). Ranges will include any vendors that fall within the listing of vendors sorted alpha-numerically in ascending order (0-9, A-Z) between the two (2) values.

Selection_Vendor_ByVendor

Use the alternate menu to select a vendor by the name or company instead of the code in either text area.

Selection_Vendor_BeginsWith

By Type

There are preset types that may be assigned to vendors for classification reasons. A few, if used, such as "pay to" and "installed sales" are used to either filter out or include the vendor in certain areas of the software; however, most are just provided for your own classification reasons and are not required.

Selection_Vendor_ByType

By Class

Class is another optional classification tool provided for vendors. In this case, there are no pre-defined values, so your company would decide whether or not and in which way these would be implemented.

Selection_Vendor_ByClass

All Vendors

The "all vendors" radio button will include all vendor records in the selection. Depending upon the number of vendors your company uses, this may be a significant number of records.

Selection_Vendor_AllVendors

Custom

The custom selection option still requires a choice of either customer or vendor records; however, it also permits you to define "custom" conditions to which to apply to the selection of records. Each rule involves 3 parts:

•A "data field" that a some value you define will be compared with. Data fields are all assigned a "type" that defines what kind of values the field maintains (dates, numbers, text, etc.).

•An "operator" that determines how the comparison is made (equal to, greater than, etc.). Different operators will be offered depending upon the type of data the field represents.

•A "value" that is the same data type as the "data field" you selected (date, integer, string, Boolean (true/false), etc.).

Selection_Custom

When you specify more than one "custom" rule, you also must decide whether (a) the new rule is to be applied in addition to and including the previous rule (AND) or (b) if either rule should be applied to selection (OR). Two radio buttons ("AND" and "OR") are presented for this purpose. The appropriate choice should be made prior to adding the rule. The default is "AND."

Here's an example using a sample list of customers...

Account #	Credit Limit	Outstanding Balance
000010	0	$ 25.92
000046	10,000	$ 0.00
001019	5,999	$ 3,251.84
090051	7,500	$ 7,5819.00

If we were to establish two (2) custom selection criteria of the following:

Credit Limit > 0 AND OutStanding Balance > 0

The result would be a selection of the two (2) accounts: 001019 and 090051. This is because they are the only accounts that meet both selection criteria.

Instead, if we use the same criteria but an "OR" comparison, the results would include all 4 accounts because each account meets either or both of the criteria.

Credit Limit > 0 OR OutStanding Balance > 0

Conditions or "rules" are evaluated from top-to-bottom (the same order as they were entered) in relationship to the grid.

Conditions may be deleted by choosing "delete" from the alternate menu on the grid or selecting a row and pressing the "delete" key on your keyboard.

Populating the Distribution List

The middle area of the form has a grid control that will list any contacts matching the criteria you specify. This grid is only populated after using the View (F7) function. The only contacts who are included with be either the primary AR (Receivables) contact for the account or POS (Point of Sale) contact for the master job. Accounts may have other contacts who are not assigned to either.

E-Blast_Recipients

Contacts are added to the grid regardless of whether or not an email address is linked with the contact; however, when selecting recipients, you can only select a contact (row) that has an email address.

The "Sel" (select) column contains check boxes which are used to indicate which contacts are to be included as recipients for the email message. Selection may be done either manually or by using the "Select All" or "Clear All" options available on the Menu Marker's context menu. Only contacts with a value in the "Email Address" column may be selected in either case. Email addresses are not checked as to whether they are valid, so it's suggested that the user scan through the listing and clear the check box for any invalid entries.

E-Blast_SelectAll

Message Fields

The text fields in the lower area of the form are used for defining the message and adding an attachment (required). The number of contacts ("Count") and number of possible recipients ("Selected") are also shown for reference in this area.

E-Blast_Messages

From

The "from" address is the address used as both the "from" and default "reply-to" address when the email is sent. It's possible and suggested that you include both a name and address. Another aspect to consider is that any replies from recipients or rejected messages (bounce-backs) will also use the same address. The address should therefore be a valid email account that the user sending the messages has access to.

Subject

A subject is required. Email recipients typically select mail messages based on the subject and/or from address. The length of the subject is limited to 50-characters.

Attached

The attachment is really the point of the message and is required. This may be a sales flier, letter, etc. You should consider the format of the files you transmit especially in regard to whether the recipients will be able to access them. For example, if you attach a Microsoft Word document, recipients with out Microsoft Office (and the correct version in some cases) won't be able to open/read the attachment. PDF (Portable Document File) formats are commonly used for documents and require free software (Adobe Reader), so that is a good choice in most cases. Plain text or HTML files are other possible formats that would be compatible with a variety of devices and operating systems. It's best to avoid extremely large attachments or any unusual file types since these may be rejected by some mail servers. Attachments for hosted customers will be in their "workresources/shared folder" as this is where they must save files.

Message

The "message" area is for defining the body or text of the email. Email is sent with plain text formatting, so you should not use any type of formatting or HTML within the body text. The message length is limited to 512-characters (including any control or other characters such as carriage returns, spaces, etc.) so it's best to keep messages as short as possible. If you want to send a longer message, consider including the message as part of the attachment.

*If you have defined addendum text in the Parameters form, it will be added to the end of any message you send. This can be used to include "opt-out", privacy, or any other information as needed.

Sending the Message

To send the message, choose Process (F12). Any warnings or errors will be reported at this time. If there are no task list items, the messages will be added to the standard email queue for immediate processing. Messages with a large number of recipients will be batched into separate messages. The number of recipients per message will vary based on the combined lengths of the addresses (recipients up to 1024-characters in total are allowed). Just so you don't send an email before you're ready, a confirmation "yes/no" prompt is provided when processing.

The Email, Fax & Print Queue utility can be used to check the status of E-Blast messages (a separate check box is provided so that these can be separated from other email).