Sage 200 email statements

In these times of carbon footprint awareness, tightened purse strings and an increased need to keep on top of credit control, an obvious – if admittedly small – improvement might be to start using emailed statements rather than posting them.

Sage 200 can produce a batch of statements, attaching them to a separate email per customer, addressed as defined in the customer’s details on the sales ledger.

You can run a mixture of email and hard copy statements so that those customers who prefer to still be sent postal copies can do so.   For those being sent email copies, you will be able to see and manually amend email content, should you wish, before actually sending the email.

With a little time spent setting up the customer records to ensure there are up-to-date contact names and email addresses (possibly a good opportunity to call and re-start debt chasing anyway), and choosing the email statement layout in the Documents tab, you’re good to go!  (Assuming you’re running a compatible email application such as Microsoft Outlook, which most businesses are).  In Sage 200 2009, it is the contact who is assigned to the SendStatementsTo role whose email address will be used for this purpose, whereas in earlier versions it was the main contact email address as displayed on the first tab in the account setup.

You can have two separate emailable layouts (and two paper ones), so for example a UK and an overseas version asking people to pay into different bank accounts.  The layouts can be amended to include your logo and any other personalised information.  This has been the case for a while, but embedded logos used to cause a bit of an issue in versions prior to 2009 as they would sometimes appear as a separate attachment to the statement html file on the email; this would read OK and re-embed itself on opening the statement, but wasn’t ideal.  However, Sage 200 2009 attaches the statements as pdfs, which holds the embedded logo correctly.

When running a batch of statements, you can then choose whether to run the statements to email and printer (which will reflect the setting per customer on the Documents tab) or to send all to the printer if you want a paper copy regardless of the preferred sending method; if you have your output options set to spooler, this will obviously just spool, rather than print the document.   This can be useful if you just wanted to run a copy for your own reference, of if you then wanted to use the Email option on the print spooler to manually send a copy to different one-off recipient.

So, if you are a Sage 200 user and want to streamline your credit control processes, getting as many of your customers as possible onto email format statements is a great place to start because they’re then quick to produce, targeted, received immediately, and cheaper to send as well!