Send Documents by Email

To communicate the contents of business documents quickly to your business partners, such as the payment information on sales documents to customers, you can use the Report Layout feature to define document-specific content that gets inserted in email bodies automatically. For more information, see Managing Report and Document Layouts.

To enable emails from within Business Central, start the Set Up Email assisted setup guide on the Role Center.

You can email practically all document types as attachments to email messages directly from the page that shows the document. In addition to the attachment, you can set up document-specific email bodies with core information from the document preceded by standard text that greets the mail recipient and introduces the document in question. To offer your customers to pay for sales electronically using a payment service, such as PayPal, you can also have the PayPal information and hyperlink inserted in the email body.

From all supported documents, you initiate emailing by choosing the Send action, on posted documents, or the Post and Send action, on non-posted documents.

If the Email field on the Send Document to page is set to Yes (Prompt for Settings), then the Send Email page opens prefilled with the contact person in the To: field and the document attached as a PDF file. In the Body field, you can either enter text manually or you can have the field filled with a document-specific email body that you have set up.

The following procedure describes how to set the Sales - Invoice report up to be used for document-specific email bodies when you email posted sales invoices.

To set up a document-specific email body for sales invoices

  1. Choose the Lightbulb that opens the Tell Me feature icon, enter Report Selections Sales, and then choose the related link.

  2. On the Report Selection - Sales page, in the Usage field, select Invoice.

  3. On a new line, in the Report ID field, select, for example, standard report 1306.

  4. Select the Use for Email Body check box.

  5. Choose the Email Body Layout Code field, and then select a layout from the drop-down list.

    Report layouts define both the style and the content of the email body, including the standard text that precedes the core document information in the email body. You can see all available report layouts if you choose the Select from full list button in the drop-down list.

  6. To view or edit the layout that the email body is based on, select the layout on the Custom Report Layouts page, and then choose the Edit Layout action.

  7. If you want to offer customers to pay for sales electronically, you can set up the related payment service, such as PayPal, and then have the PayPal information and hyperlink inserted in the email body as well. For more information, see Enable Customer Payments Through PayPal.

  8. Choose the OK button.

Now, when you choose, for example, the Send action on the Posted Sales Invoice page, the email body will contain the document information of report 1306 preceded by styled standard text according to the report layout that you selected in step 5.

The following procedure describes how to send a posted sales invoice as an email message with the document attached as a PDF file and with a document-specific email body.

To send documents by email

  1. Choose the Lightbulb that opens the Tell Me feature icon, enter Posted Sales Invoices, and then choose the related link.

  2. Select the relevant posted sales invoice, and then choose the Send action. The Send Document to page opens.

  3. In the Email field, select Yes (Prompt for Settings). For more information, see Set Up Document Sending Profiles.

  4. Choose the OK button. The Send Email page opens.

  5. In the To: field, enter a valid email address. The default value is the customer email address.

  6. In the Subject field, enter a descriptive subject text. The default value is the customer name and invoice number.

  7. In the Attachment field, the generated invoice is attached by default as a PDF file.

  8. In the Body field, enter a short message to the recipient.

    If a document-specific email body is set up on the Report Selection - Sales page, then the Body field is filled in automatically. For more information, see To set up a document-specific email body for sales invoices.

  9. Choose the OK button to send the email message.

Note

If you do not want to specify email settings each time you email a document, you can select the Yes (Use Default Settings) option in the Email field on the Send Document to page. In that case, the Send Email page will not open. See Step 4. For more information, see Set Up Document Sending Profiles.

Documents marked as printed when they are sent

Some documents in Business Central have a field that specifies how many times that document has been printed. The field is also updated if you don't print the document but send it in email instead. The field even gets updated if you don't actually send the document, such as when your organization has not set up email, or when the contact that you want to send the document to doesn't have an email address listed. In all scenarios, as far as Business Central is concerned, the document is printed because a PDF file is generated.

The user might not see this generated file, but this is why the field is updated.

See Also

Managing Report and Document Layouts
Set up Email
Invoice Sales
Working with Business Central