Great Plains Customization: Automatic Sales Invoices emailing to the customers

Microsoft Dynamics GP modifications and custom programming scenarios should be considered when third party add-ons are too expensive or too complex to implement. If this is the case – you can relatively quickly and cost effectively develop your own custom module. We recommend to review such software development tools as Great Plains Dexterity, eConnect, SQL stored procedures, Modifier with VBA, GP Integration Manager. In this small publication we would like to give you customization specification for custom invoice mailer via email:

1. Writing PDF documents automatically for the whole batch. The most elegant approach to achieve this task is to deploy Dex cursor, which will come through each SOP invoice in the selected batch and will write this invoice into PDF file (where the name of the file should be something unique, like invoice number). You have to deploy real PDF writer from Adobe, free versions of PDF printers will not do the job, as GP Dexterity deploys PDF writer driver. There is one additional secret to know – you will need to set programmable delay between two invoices in the row, to give PDF writer enough time to finish PDF generation (otherwise you will get blank invoices or invoices of the same content)

2. Deploying SQL mail at the server. We recommend you to deploy SQL mail or xp_sendmail extended stored procedure. However other emailing options will also do the job. In order to avoid security problems (obviously you do not want all the GP users to have the right to execute xp_sendmail), we recommend you to separate emailing routine into SQL scheduled task (which could be executed say every 30 minutes)

3. Custom Invoice Status table. Here you will be logging invoice info, when Dexterity cursor will place it for the following emailing, then when SQL mail will process the document you will change the status to completed or emailed

4. Alternative email solutions. If you would like to deploy Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Portal, then please review Electronic Document Delivery module for BP, as it allows you to map SOP invoices to be emailed or delivered to the customer automatically. Obviously Great Plains Business Portal Implementation should take additional overhead, but this solution comes from MBS directly and its is supported by Microsoft