Invoice Selection and processing

You have the option of establishing a new menu item within Infor® ERP or you may decide to run this off of the start menu instead.

Upon invoking this new tool you’ll be presented with the following UI:

You’ll note the following:

• The UI loads with all unpublished Invoices.
  • The status is determined from a new UD (user defined) table which is needed for this customization to keep track of what has and has not been published through this new process.

• The “Accept” column is defaulted with a check for those invoices where there is an e-mail address for the customer contact.

• There can be multiple e-mail addresses listed (separated by a semicolon) per invoice.
  • The e-mail addresses are compiled from the list of “Alternate Contacts” associated to the Customer (see setup paragraph above).

• Each customer is summarized as far as the number of invoices to be published.
  • All invoices for the customer will be handled the same and sent to all contacts listed under the e-mail address column.

• You can further restrict the list through entry of a customer id or customer name filter.
  • This is a “contains” filtering so if you entered say “as” in the customer id field you would pare down the list in the grid to only those customer id’s which have “as” somewhere in their id.

• You have the option to remove the checked “Accept” column through the “Deselect” option at the top.
  • When no selections are present in the “Accept” column this becomes the reverse (Select) with a dropdown list of three ways to automatically check entries in the “Accept” column:
    • Those entries with at least one e-mail address
    • Those entries with no e-mail address (printed and mailed invoices) or
    • All entries

• There are processing triggers for “E-mail invoices” and “Print invoices”
  • This solution works best as a multi-pass solution.
    • One pass processes invoices which have e-mail addresses.
    • A second pass prints off invoices for slipping into envelopes and dropping into the mail.

When satisfied with the list of selections for processing (Accepted) you then click on the appropriate action trigger (in the case of the example e-mailing the invoice).

Note that a new column appears with the processing status.  Initially everything “Accepted” will list as “Pending” and as each item successively processes the status changes to “Completed”.

When all processing is completed the “Status” column disappears and all of the processed entries are removed from the list.

The results of processing the selected invoices are:

• An e-mail has been constructed which is addressed to the e-mail list from the pre-processing UI panel.

• Copies of the previously unprocessed invoices will be attached to the e-mail.

Controlling Entries in the Grid

There are instances where you might not want to ever publish invoices for a given customer.  The way the solution is structured these invoices would continue to populate on the UI panel every time you initiated the process.  To permit permanent removal of a set of invoices from appearing you have the option to click on the “Accept” box for those entries and then invoking the “Remove Invoices” process.  The custom UD table is updated so that the selected entries will not appear again in the future.

Likewise you may want to add a set of invoices to the processing list which aren’t currently being pulled in automatically.  In most instances this would be previously processed invoices which need to be re-sent for some reason.

You’ll note that there are numerous search filters available to assist in the process of selecting and aggregating together the invoices which you’d like to add to the list of publishable invoices.  By checking the “Accept” checkbox in this UI panel you signify that you’d like to add the entry for that line.  When you have completed your selections you merely invoke “Add Invoices” and the main grid then populates with a summary entry for the invoices chosen.

Providing an Account Summary

The solution also provides the ability to generate a summary report of what has been processed by invoking the “Process Account Summary”.

You are presented with a similar grid which populates with all of the customers which were processed in this session and those with e-mail entries are automatically “Accepted”.  You have the ability to manage the list of selections as you see fit and then can initiate processing through selection of either “E-mail Acct. Summary” or “Print Acct. Summary”.  Those entries with e-mail addresses would be selected together and reported using the “E-mail Acct. Summary” while those without e-mail addresses would be selected together and reported using the other.

During processing you’ll note the inclusion of the “Status” column in the UI panel with an initial “Pending” status followed up by “Completed” as each “Accepted” entry in the list completes processing.  In this instance the completed entries do not disappear so that you can re-initiate generation of the summary if for some reason it didn’t generate (perhaps a printer problem).

The resulting summary report would look like the following: