Sage 100

I have had several of my customers ask if there was a way to create email letters to their customers.  Sage 100 has the customer emails in paperless office, customer maintenance, contacts, etc. and there is no good way to get a simple list or to create a mail merge.  This seems like it would be of considerable value to have.

Yes... the email address to use is always a complication.  I've done a SQL view to extract Paperless settings for use with external reporting, but obviously that only works for a Premium system.

I have had several of my customers ask if there was a way to create email letters to their customers.  Sage 100 has the customer emails in paperless office, customer maintenance, contacts, etc. and there is no good way to get a simple list or to create a mail merge.  This seems like it would be of considerable value to have.

Some years back, we did this with Sage Alerts.  You can use Visual Cut as well.  We did merges using information from the various tables that @Doug Higgs mentions above.  We used Acess PTQ's and SQRY's to do the heavy lifting.  Primary use was mailing out invoices every night as Paperless office was a snail emailing.  We also used SA for mailing customer statements every Sunday to territory salesmen.  We also consolidated AR and sales reports for four Sage companies.  Powerful stuff, but somewhat techie.  It would be nice to have simpler to use functionality baked in as @Doug Higgs and @Wayne Schulz are requesting.  But hey, this is SAGE 100.  Need something robust like INTAACT for easy to use features.

Yes... the email address to use is always a complication.  I've done a SQL view to extract Paperless settings for use with external reporting, but obviously that only works for a Premium system.

I have had several of my customers ask if there was a way to create email letters to their customers.  Sage 100 has the customer emails in paperless office, customer maintenance, contacts, etc. and there is no good way to get a simple list or to create a mail merge.  This seems like it would be of considerable value to have.

In a perfect world, Sage CRM integrated with Sage 100 would permit mail merging to be driven from CRM. I have no idea if it does this easily.

The big complication, as noted earlier, is pulling the correct email address. Sage 100 doesn't natively have "contact type" fields in Contacts, but you can standardize titles with meanings, that can enable selection for dunnings. There's not much need for actually including titles in correspondence these days, so this could be useful.

Anyway, customers must first dump the contacts to excel, clean them up - including emails - then reimport them.

Then, a simpleminded approach is to use Sage Intelligence to dump the contacts to excel depending on past due, include the balance (calc field in SI), and use the excel data to feed Office 365 mail merge. Invite them to pay from the customer portal (Sage/cimcloud or cc vendor's).

Use the same approach to dump phone # on those past 60 days (or whatever) to call. 

At some point, personalized calling and talking is needed. If they're not responding to monthly statement with link to Click2Pay, the CFO has a sales problem ...

And this is exactly the problem that Sage's coming AR Automation tool is designed to handle.

Some years back, we did this with Sage Alerts.  You can use Visual Cut as well.  We did merges using information from the various tables that @Doug Higgs mentions above.  We used Acess PTQ's and SQRY's to do the heavy lifting.  Primary use was mailing out invoices every night as Paperless office was a snail emailing.  We also used SA for mailing customer statements every Sunday to territory salesmen.  We also consolidated AR and sales reports for four Sage companies.  Powerful stuff, but somewhat techie.  It would be nice to have simpler to use functionality baked in as @Doug Higgs and @Wayne Schulz are requesting.  But hey, this is SAGE 100.  Need something robust like INTAACT for easy to use features.

Yes... the email address to use is always a complication.  I've done a SQL view to extract Paperless settings for use with external reporting, but obviously that only works for a Premium system.

I have had several of my customers ask if there was a way to create email letters to their customers.  Sage 100 has the customer emails in paperless office, customer maintenance, contacts, etc. and there is no good way to get a simple list or to create a mail merge.  This seems like it would be of considerable value to have.

Thanks for the suggestions - I think using a third-party tool like SAW or Visual Cut is probably the way to go. My concern with these requests is whether the customer has the budget for the initial discovery, scoping, and, ultimately, the actual project. This customer claims they're moving to Netsuite, so I'm not looking to invest a lot in free discovery.

I find many customers have a beer budget/champagne taste(dreams).

In a perfect world, Sage CRM integrated with Sage 100 would permit mail merging to be driven from CRM. I have no idea if it does this easily.

The big complication, as noted earlier, is pulling the correct email address. Sage 100 doesn't natively have "contact type" fields in Contacts, but you can standardize titles with meanings, that can enable selection for dunnings. There's not much need for actually including titles in correspondence these days, so this could be useful.

Anyway, customers must first dump the contacts to excel, clean them up - including emails - then reimport them.

Then, a simpleminded approach is to use Sage Intelligence to dump the contacts to excel depending on past due, include the balance (calc field in SI), and use the excel data to feed Office 365 mail merge. Invite them to pay from the customer portal (Sage/cimcloud or cc vendor's).

Use the same approach to dump phone # on those past 60 days (or whatever) to call. 

At some point, personalized calling and talking is needed. If they're not responding to monthly statement with link to Click2Pay, the CFO has a sales problem ...

And this is exactly the problem that Sage's coming AR Automation tool is designed to handle.

Some years back, we did this with Sage Alerts.  You can use Visual Cut as well.  We did merges using information from the various tables that @Doug Higgs mentions above.  We used Acess PTQ's and SQRY's to do the heavy lifting.  Primary use was mailing out invoices every night as Paperless office was a snail emailing.  We also used SA for mailing customer statements every Sunday to territory salesmen.  We also consolidated AR and sales reports for four Sage companies.  Powerful stuff, but somewhat techie.  It would be nice to have simpler to use functionality baked in as @Doug Higgs and @Wayne Schulz are requesting.  But hey, this is SAGE 100.  Need something robust like INTAACT for easy to use features.

Yes... the email address to use is always a complication.  I've done a SQL view to extract Paperless settings for use with external reporting, but obviously that only works for a Premium system.

I have had several of my customers ask if there was a way to create email letters to their customers.  Sage 100 has the customer emails in paperless office, customer maintenance, contacts, etc. and there is no good way to get a simple list or to create a mail merge.  This seems like it would be of considerable value to have.

@Wayne Schulz - Amen to the beer budget!!

Thanks for the suggestions - I think using a third-party tool like SAW or Visual Cut is probably the way to go. My concern with these requests is whether the customer has the budget for the initial discovery, scoping, and, ultimately, the actual project. This customer claims they're moving to Netsuite, so I'm not looking to invest a lot in free discovery.

I find many customers have a beer budget/champagne taste(dreams).

In a perfect world, Sage CRM integrated with Sage 100 would permit mail merging to be driven from CRM. I have no idea if it does this easily.

The big complication, as noted earlier, is pulling the correct email address. Sage 100 doesn't natively have "contact type" fields in Contacts, but you can standardize titles with meanings, that can enable selection for dunnings. There's not much need for actually including titles in correspondence these days, so this could be useful.

Anyway, customers must first dump the contacts to excel, clean them up - including emails - then reimport them.

Then, a simpleminded approach is to use Sage Intelligence to dump the contacts to excel depending on past due, include the balance (calc field in SI), and use the excel data to feed Office 365 mail merge. Invite them to pay from the customer portal (Sage/cimcloud or cc vendor's).

Use the same approach to dump phone # on those past 60 days (or whatever) to call. 

At some point, personalized calling and talking is needed. If they're not responding to monthly statement with link to Click2Pay, the CFO has a sales problem ...

And this is exactly the problem that Sage's coming AR Automation tool is designed to handle.

Some years back, we did this with Sage Alerts.  You can use Visual Cut as well.  We did merges using information from the various tables that @Doug Higgs mentions above.  We used Acess PTQ's and SQRY's to do the heavy lifting.  Primary use was mailing out invoices every night as Paperless office was a snail emailing.  We also used SA for mailing customer statements every Sunday to territory salesmen.  We also consolidated AR and sales reports for four Sage companies.  Powerful stuff, but somewhat techie.  It would be nice to have simpler to use functionality baked in as @Doug Higgs and @Wayne Schulz are requesting.  But hey, this is SAGE 100.  Need something robust like INTAACT for easy to use features.

Yes... the email address to use is always a complication.  I've done a SQL view to extract Paperless settings for use with external reporting, but obviously that only works for a Premium system.

I have had several of my customers ask if there was a way to create email letters to their customers.  Sage 100 has the customer emails in paperless office, customer maintenance, contacts, etc. and there is no good way to get a simple list or to create a mail merge.  This seems like it would be of considerable value to have.

I'm a big believer in  (a) Maintaining a list of minimum fees by project type ( saves a ton of your time on creating proposals that go nowhere because the customer thought the cost would be free or $20 ) and (b) letting the customer know what the price range will be BEFORE working up a proposal.

@Wayne Schulz - Amen to the beer budget!!

Thanks for the suggestions - I think using a third-party tool like SAW or Visual Cut is probably the way to go. My concern with these requests is whether the customer has the budget for the initial discovery, scoping, and, ultimately, the actual project. This customer claims they're moving to Netsuite, so I'm not looking to invest a lot in free discovery.

I find many customers have a beer budget/champagne taste(dreams).

In a perfect world, Sage CRM integrated with Sage 100 would permit mail merging to be driven from CRM. I have no idea if it does this easily.

The big complication, as noted earlier, is pulling the correct email address. Sage 100 doesn't natively have "contact type" fields in Contacts, but you can standardize titles with meanings, that can enable selection for dunnings. There's not much need for actually including titles in correspondence these days, so this could be useful.

Anyway, customers must first dump the contacts to excel, clean them up - including emails - then reimport them.

Then, a simpleminded approach is to use Sage Intelligence to dump the contacts to excel depending on past due, include the balance (calc field in SI), and use the excel data to feed Office 365 mail merge. Invite them to pay from the customer portal (Sage/cimcloud or cc vendor's).

Use the same approach to dump phone # on those past 60 days (or whatever) to call. 

At some point, personalized calling and talking is needed. If they're not responding to monthly statement with link to Click2Pay, the CFO has a sales problem ...

And this is exactly the problem that Sage's coming AR Automation tool is designed to handle.

Some years back, we did this with Sage Alerts.  You can use Visual Cut as well.  We did merges using information from the various tables that @Doug Higgs mentions above.  We used Acess PTQ's and SQRY's to do the heavy lifting.  Primary use was mailing out invoices every night as Paperless office was a snail emailing.  We also used SA for mailing customer statements every Sunday to territory salesmen.  We also consolidated AR and sales reports for four Sage companies.  Powerful stuff, but somewhat techie.  It would be nice to have simpler to use functionality baked in as @Doug Higgs and @Wayne Schulz are requesting.  But hey, this is SAGE 100.  Need something robust like INTAACT for easy to use features.

Yes... the email address to use is always a complication.  I've done a SQL view to extract Paperless settings for use with external reporting, but obviously that only works for a Premium system.

I have had several of my customers ask if there was a way to create email letters to their customers.  Sage 100 has the customer emails in paperless office, customer maintenance, contacts, etc. and there is no good way to get a simple list or to create a mail merge.  This seems like it would be of considerable value to have.

For sure.  Saying something like: "it could be anywhere from $2k to $10k, depending on details"... can certainly save time on tire-kickers.

I'm a big believer in  (a) Maintaining a list of minimum fees by project type ( saves a ton of your time on creating proposals that go nowhere because the customer thought the cost would be free or $20 ) and (b) letting the customer know what the price range will be BEFORE working up a proposal.

@Wayne Schulz - Amen to the beer budget!!

Thanks for the suggestions - I think using a third-party tool like SAW or Visual Cut is probably the way to go. My concern with these requests is whether the customer has the budget for the initial discovery, scoping, and, ultimately, the actual project. This customer claims they're moving to Netsuite, so I'm not looking to invest a lot in free discovery.

I find many customers have a beer budget/champagne taste(dreams).

In a perfect world, Sage CRM integrated with Sage 100 would permit mail merging to be driven from CRM. I have no idea if it does this easily.

The big complication, as noted earlier, is pulling the correct email address. Sage 100 doesn't natively have "contact type" fields in Contacts, but you can standardize titles with meanings, that can enable selection for dunnings. There's not much need for actually including titles in correspondence these days, so this could be useful.

Anyway, customers must first dump the contacts to excel, clean them up - including emails - then reimport them.

Then, a simpleminded approach is to use Sage Intelligence to dump the contacts to excel depending on past due, include the balance (calc field in SI), and use the excel data to feed Office 365 mail merge. Invite them to pay from the customer portal (Sage/cimcloud or cc vendor's).

Use the same approach to dump phone # on those past 60 days (or whatever) to call. 

At some point, personalized calling and talking is needed. If they're not responding to monthly statement with link to Click2Pay, the CFO has a sales problem ...

And this is exactly the problem that Sage's coming AR Automation tool is designed to handle.

Some years back, we did this with Sage Alerts.  You can use Visual Cut as well.  We did merges using information from the various tables that @Doug Higgs mentions above.  We used Acess PTQ's and SQRY's to do the heavy lifting.  Primary use was mailing out invoices every night as Paperless office was a snail emailing.  We also used SA for mailing customer statements every Sunday to territory salesmen.  We also consolidated AR and sales reports for four Sage companies.  Powerful stuff, but somewhat techie.  It would be nice to have simpler to use functionality baked in as @Doug Higgs and @Wayne Schulz are requesting.  But hey, this is SAGE 100.  Need something robust like INTAACT for easy to use features.

Yes... the email address to use is always a complication.  I've done a SQL view to extract Paperless settings for use with external reporting, but obviously that only works for a Premium system.

I have had several of my customers ask if there was a way to create email letters to their customers.  Sage 100 has the customer emails in paperless office, customer maintenance, contacts, etc. and there is no good way to get a simple list or to create a mail merge.  This seems like it would be of considerable value to have.

I always provide a "budgetary quote"... an informal email stating the price will be at least $x,xxx and depending on the features requested will be more.  If the balk at that then fine.... The goal is to find out as soon as possible if you need to cut bait and move on to the next prospect.

For sure.  Saying something like: "it could be anywhere from $2k to $10k, depending on details"... can certainly save time on tire-kickers.

I'm a big believer in  (a) Maintaining a list of minimum fees by project type ( saves a ton of your time on creating proposals that go nowhere because the customer thought the cost would be free or $20 ) and (b) letting the customer know what the price range will be BEFORE working up a proposal.

@Wayne Schulz - Amen to the beer budget!!

Thanks for the suggestions - I think using a third-party tool like SAW or Visual Cut is probably the way to go. My concern with these requests is whether the customer has the budget for the initial discovery, scoping, and, ultimately, the actual project. This customer claims they're moving to Netsuite, so I'm not looking to invest a lot in free discovery.

I find many customers have a beer budget/champagne taste(dreams).

In a perfect world, Sage CRM integrated with Sage 100 would permit mail merging to be driven from CRM. I have no idea if it does this easily.

The big complication, as noted earlier, is pulling the correct email address. Sage 100 doesn't natively have "contact type" fields in Contacts, but you can standardize titles with meanings, that can enable selection for dunnings. There's not much need for actually including titles in correspondence these days, so this could be useful.

Anyway, customers must first dump the contacts to excel, clean them up - including emails - then reimport them.

Then, a simpleminded approach is to use Sage Intelligence to dump the contacts to excel depending on past due, include the balance (calc field in SI), and use the excel data to feed Office 365 mail merge. Invite them to pay from the customer portal (Sage/cimcloud or cc vendor's).

Use the same approach to dump phone # on those past 60 days (or whatever) to call. 

At some point, personalized calling and talking is needed. If they're not responding to monthly statement with link to Click2Pay, the CFO has a sales problem ...

And this is exactly the problem that Sage's coming AR Automation tool is designed to handle.

Some years back, we did this with Sage Alerts.  You can use Visual Cut as well.  We did merges using information from the various tables that @Doug Higgs mentions above.  We used Acess PTQ's and SQRY's to do the heavy lifting.  Primary use was mailing out invoices every night as Paperless office was a snail emailing.  We also used SA for mailing customer statements every Sunday to territory salesmen.  We also consolidated AR and sales reports for four Sage companies.  Powerful stuff, but somewhat techie.  It would be nice to have simpler to use functionality baked in as @Doug Higgs and @Wayne Schulz are requesting.  But hey, this is SAGE 100.  Need something robust like INTAACT for easy to use features.

Yes... the email address to use is always a complication.  I've done a SQL view to extract Paperless settings for use with external reporting, but obviously that only works for a Premium system.

I always provide a "budgetary quote"... an informal email stating the price will be at least $x,xxx and depending on the features requested will be more.  If the balk at that then fine.... The goal is to find out as soon as possible if you need to cut bait and move on to the next prospect.

For sure.  Saying something like: "it could be anywhere from $2k to $10k, depending on details"... can certainly save time on tire-kickers.

I'm a big believer in  (a) Maintaining a list of minimum fees by project type ( saves a ton of your time on creating proposals that go nowhere because the customer thought the cost would be free or $20 ) and (b) letting the customer know what the price range will be BEFORE working up a proposal.

@Wayne Schulz - Amen to the beer budget!!

Thanks for the suggestions - I think using a third-party tool like SAW or Visual Cut is probably the way to go. My concern with these requests is whether the customer has the budget for the initial discovery, scoping, and, ultimately, the actual project. This customer claims they're moving to Netsuite, so I'm not looking to invest a lot in free discovery.

I find many customers have a beer budget/champagne taste(dreams).

In a perfect world, Sage CRM integrated with Sage 100 would permit mail merging to be driven from CRM. I have no idea if it does this easily.

The big complication, as noted earlier, is pulling the correct email address. Sage 100 doesn't natively have "contact type" fields in Contacts, but you can standardize titles with meanings, that can enable selection for dunnings. There's not much need for actually including titles in correspondence these days, so this could be useful.

Anyway, customers must first dump the contacts to excel, clean them up - including emails - then reimport them.

Then, a simpleminded approach is to use Sage Intelligence to dump the contacts to excel depending on past due, include the balance (calc field in SI), and use the excel data to feed Office 365 mail merge. Invite them to pay from the customer portal (Sage/cimcloud or cc vendor's).

Use the same approach to dump phone # on those past 60 days (or whatever) to call. 

At some point, personalized calling and talking is needed. If they're not responding to monthly statement with link to Click2Pay, the CFO has a sales problem ...

And this is exactly the problem that Sage's coming AR Automation tool is designed to handle.

Some years back, we did this with Sage Alerts.  You can use Visual Cut as well.  We did merges using information from the various tables that @Doug Higgs mentions above.  We used Acess PTQ's and SQRY's to do the heavy lifting.  Primary use was mailing out invoices every night as Paperless office was a snail emailing.  We also used SA for mailing customer statements every Sunday to territory salesmen.  We also consolidated AR and sales reports for four Sage companies.  Powerful stuff, but somewhat techie.  It would be nice to have simpler to use functionality baked in as @Doug Higgs and @Wayne Schulz are requesting.  But hey, this is SAGE 100.  Need something robust like INTAACT for easy to use features.

Yes... the email address to use is always a complication.  I've done a SQL view to extract Paperless settings for use with external reporting, but obviously that only works for a Premium system.

I have had several of my customers ask if there was a way to create email letters to their customers.  Sage 100 has the customer emails in paperless office, customer maintenance, contacts, etc. and there is no good way to get a simple list or to create a mail merge.  This seems like it would be of considerable value to have.

I always provide a "budgetary quote"... an informal email stating the price will be at least $x,xxx and depending on the features requested will be more.  If the balk at that then fine.... The goal is to find out as soon as possible if you need to cut bait and move on to the next prospect.

For sure.  Saying something like: "it could be anywhere from $2k to $10k, depending on details"... can certainly save time on tire-kickers.

I'm a big believer in  (a) Maintaining a list of minimum fees by project type ( saves a ton of your time on creating proposals that go nowhere because the customer thought the cost would be free or $20 ) and (b) letting the customer know what the price range will be BEFORE working up a proposal.

@Wayne Schulz - Amen to the beer budget!!

Thanks for the suggestions - I think using a third-party tool like SAW or Visual Cut is probably the way to go. My concern with these requests is whether the customer has the budget for the initial discovery, scoping, and, ultimately, the actual project. This customer claims they're moving to Netsuite, so I'm not looking to invest a lot in free discovery.

I find many customers have a beer budget/champagne taste(dreams).

In a perfect world, Sage CRM integrated with Sage 100 would permit mail merging to be driven from CRM. I have no idea if it does this easily.

The big complication, as noted earlier, is pulling the correct email address. Sage 100 doesn't natively have "contact type" fields in Contacts, but you can standardize titles with meanings, that can enable selection for dunnings. There's not much need for actually including titles in correspondence these days, so this could be useful.

Anyway, customers must first dump the contacts to excel, clean them up - including emails - then reimport them.

Then, a simpleminded approach is to use Sage Intelligence to dump the contacts to excel depending on past due, include the balance (calc field in SI), and use the excel data to feed Office 365 mail merge. Invite them to pay from the customer portal (Sage/cimcloud or cc vendor's).

Use the same approach to dump phone # on those past 60 days (or whatever) to call. 

At some point, personalized calling and talking is needed. If they're not responding to monthly statement with link to Click2Pay, the CFO has a sales problem ...

And this is exactly the problem that Sage's coming AR Automation tool is designed to handle.

Some years back, we did this with Sage Alerts.  You can use Visual Cut as well.  We did merges using information from the various tables that @Doug Higgs mentions above.  We used Acess PTQ's and SQRY's to do the heavy lifting.  Primary use was mailing out invoices every night as Paperless office was a snail emailing.  We also used SA for mailing customer statements every Sunday to territory salesmen.  We also consolidated AR and sales reports for four Sage companies.  Powerful stuff, but somewhat techie.  It would be nice to have simpler to use functionality baked in as @Doug Higgs and @Wayne Schulz are requesting.  But hey, this is SAGE 100.  Need something robust like INTAACT for easy to use features.

Yes... the email address to use is always a complication.  I've done a SQL view to extract Paperless settings for use with external reporting, but obviously that only works for a Premium system.

I have had several of my customers ask if there was a way to create email letters to their customers.  Sage 100 has the customer emails in paperless office, customer maintenance, contacts, etc. and there is no good way to get a simple list or to create a mail merge.  This seems like it would be of considerable value to have.

I always provide a "budgetary quote"... an informal email stating the price will be at least $x,xxx and depending on the features requested will be more.  If the balk at that then fine.... The goal is to find out as soon as possible if you need to cut bait and move on to the next prospect.

For sure.  Saying something like: "it could be anywhere from $2k to $10k, depending on details"... can certainly save time on tire-kickers.

I'm a big believer in  (a) Maintaining a list of minimum fees by project type ( saves a ton of your time on creating proposals that go nowhere because the customer thought the cost would be free or $20 ) and (b) letting the customer know what the price range will be BEFORE working up a proposal.

@Wayne Schulz - Amen to the beer budget!!

Thanks for the suggestions - I think using a third-party tool like SAW or Visual Cut is probably the way to go. My concern with these requests is whether the customer has the budget for the initial discovery, scoping, and, ultimately, the actual project. This customer claims they're moving to Netsuite, so I'm not looking to invest a lot in free discovery.

I find many customers have a beer budget/champagne taste(dreams).

In a perfect world, Sage CRM integrated with Sage 100 would permit mail merging to be driven from CRM. I have no idea if it does this easily.

The big complication, as noted earlier, is pulling the correct email address. Sage 100 doesn't natively have "contact type" fields in Contacts, but you can standardize titles with meanings, that can enable selection for dunnings. There's not much need for actually including titles in correspondence these days, so this could be useful.

Anyway, customers must first dump the contacts to excel, clean them up - including emails - then reimport them.

Then, a simpleminded approach is to use Sage Intelligence to dump the contacts to excel depending on past due, include the balance (calc field in SI), and use the excel data to feed Office 365 mail merge. Invite them to pay from the customer portal (Sage/cimcloud or cc vendor's).

Use the same approach to dump phone # on those past 60 days (or whatever) to call. 

At some point, personalized calling and talking is needed. If they're not responding to monthly statement with link to Click2Pay, the CFO has a sales problem ...

And this is exactly the problem that Sage's coming AR Automation tool is designed to handle.

Some years back, we did this with Sage Alerts.  You can use Visual Cut as well.  We did merges using information from the various tables that @Doug Higgs mentions above.  We used Acess PTQ's and SQRY's to do the heavy lifting.  Primary use was mailing out invoices every night as Paperless office was a snail emailing.  We also used SA for mailing customer statements every Sunday to territory salesmen.  We also consolidated AR and sales reports for four Sage companies.  Powerful stuff, but somewhat techie.  It would be nice to have simpler to use functionality baked in as @Doug Higgs and @Wayne Schulz are requesting.  But hey, this is SAGE 100.  Need something robust like INTAACT for easy to use features.

Yes... the email address to use is always a complication.  I've done a SQL view to extract Paperless settings for use with external reporting, but obviously that only works for a Premium system.

I have had several of my customers ask if there was a way to create email letters to their customers.  Sage 100 has the customer emails in paperless office, customer maintenance, contacts, etc. and there is no good way to get a simple list or to create a mail merge.  This seems like it would be of considerable value to have.

Agree, but we change the focus. In cases like this, the prospect/customer hasn't even thought about "budge." By asking for one, we automatically focus them on the cost and pain of change. So we try to edge them into thinking about the "why's" instead. 

"There are ways to deal with issue, although there is no switch to simply turn on. I'm curious to know what sort of alternatives you've tried [only sending statements?]. Why the interest now, what's changed? As in all things with business, fixing this requires changes to processes, employee practices and attitudes, and other things. Do you think your people would see the changes as worth the stress and effort? Why?"

Now they're thinking about the value to them of doing this. You end up with a sense of budget from this and can take it several ways. 

I always provide a "budgetary quote"... an informal email stating the price will be at least $x,xxx and depending on the features requested will be more.  If the balk at that then fine.... The goal is to find out as soon as possible if you need to cut bait and move on to the next prospect.

For sure.  Saying something like: "it could be anywhere from $2k to $10k, depending on details"... can certainly save time on tire-kickers.

I'm a big believer in  (a) Maintaining a list of minimum fees by project type ( saves a ton of your time on creating proposals that go nowhere because the customer thought the cost would be free or $20 ) and (b) letting the customer know what the price range will be BEFORE working up a proposal.

@Wayne Schulz - Amen to the beer budget!!

Thanks for the suggestions - I think using a third-party tool like SAW or Visual Cut is probably the way to go. My concern with these requests is whether the customer has the budget for the initial discovery, scoping, and, ultimately, the actual project. This customer claims they're moving to Netsuite, so I'm not looking to invest a lot in free discovery.

I find many customers have a beer budget/champagne taste(dreams).

In a perfect world, Sage CRM integrated with Sage 100 would permit mail merging to be driven from CRM. I have no idea if it does this easily.

The big complication, as noted earlier, is pulling the correct email address. Sage 100 doesn't natively have "contact type" fields in Contacts, but you can standardize titles with meanings, that can enable selection for dunnings. There's not much need for actually including titles in correspondence these days, so this could be useful.

Anyway, customers must first dump the contacts to excel, clean them up - including emails - then reimport them.

Then, a simpleminded approach is to use Sage Intelligence to dump the contacts to excel depending on past due, include the balance (calc field in SI), and use the excel data to feed Office 365 mail merge. Invite them to pay from the customer portal (Sage/cimcloud or cc vendor's).

Use the same approach to dump phone # on those past 60 days (or whatever) to call. 

At some point, personalized calling and talking is needed. If they're not responding to monthly statement with link to Click2Pay, the CFO has a sales problem ...

And this is exactly the problem that Sage's coming AR Automation tool is designed to handle.

Some years back, we did this with Sage Alerts.  You can use Visual Cut as well.  We did merges using information from the various tables that @Doug Higgs mentions above.  We used Acess PTQ's and SQRY's to do the heavy lifting.  Primary use was mailing out invoices every night as Paperless office was a snail emailing.  We also used SA for mailing customer statements every Sunday to territory salesmen.  We also consolidated AR and sales reports for four Sage companies.  Powerful stuff, but somewhat techie.  It would be nice to have simpler to use functionality baked in as @Doug Higgs and @Wayne Schulz are requesting.  But hey, this is SAGE 100.  Need something robust like INTAACT for easy to use features.

Yes... the email address to use is always a complication.  I've done a SQL view to extract Paperless settings for use with external reporting, but obviously that only works for a Premium system.

I have had several of my customers ask if there was a way to create email letters to their customers.  Sage 100 has the customer emails in paperless office, customer maintenance, contacts, etc. and there is no good way to get a simple list or to create a mail merge.  This seems like it would be of considerable value to have.

For me, this varies depending on the type of customer.  None of my customers ( zero point zero ) want to pay one penny for a consultative planning meeting. Candidly, I don't need enough practice to consider giving these meetings for free.

In most cases, once I've mentioned a price the customer self-selects whether they are a candidate for the project. It's essential to always (always) include an expiration date when the customer doesn't have the courtesy to say "no thanks".

And if the person I've given the quote to doesn't accept AND they are not already a customer - I tend not to reply to further inquiries. I've had 3 or 4 people who, for some reason (maybe due to the TLS 1.2 changes), had asked me for quotes 5+ years ago and suddenly wind up back on the phone or in email like we just talked yesterday and expecting "another free one"....

Agree, but we change the focus. In cases like this, the prospect/customer hasn't even thought about "budge." By asking for one, we automatically focus them on the cost and pain of change. So we try to edge them into thinking about the "why's" instead. 

"There are ways to deal with issue, although there is no switch to simply turn on. I'm curious to know what sort of alternatives you've tried [only sending statements?]. Why the interest now, what's changed? As in all things with business, fixing this requires changes to processes, employee practices and attitudes, and other things. Do you think your people would see the changes as worth the stress and effort? Why?"

Now they're thinking about the value to them of doing this. You end up with a sense of budget from this and can take it several ways. 

I always provide a "budgetary quote"... an informal email stating the price will be at least $x,xxx and depending on the features requested will be more.  If the balk at that then fine.... The goal is to find out as soon as possible if you need to cut bait and move on to the next prospect.

For sure.  Saying something like: "it could be anywhere from $2k to $10k, depending on details"... can certainly save time on tire-kickers.

I'm a big believer in  (a) Maintaining a list of minimum fees by project type ( saves a ton of your time on creating proposals that go nowhere because the customer thought the cost would be free or $20 ) and (b) letting the customer know what the price range will be BEFORE working up a proposal.

@Wayne Schulz - Amen to the beer budget!!

Thanks for the suggestions - I think using a third-party tool like SAW or Visual Cut is probably the way to go. My concern with these requests is whether the customer has the budget for the initial discovery, scoping, and, ultimately, the actual project. This customer claims they're moving to Netsuite, so I'm not looking to invest a lot in free discovery.

I find many customers have a beer budget/champagne taste(dreams).

In a perfect world, Sage CRM integrated with Sage 100 would permit mail merging to be driven from CRM. I have no idea if it does this easily.

The big complication, as noted earlier, is pulling the correct email address. Sage 100 doesn't natively have "contact type" fields in Contacts, but you can standardize titles with meanings, that can enable selection for dunnings. There's not much need for actually including titles in correspondence these days, so this could be useful.

Anyway, customers must first dump the contacts to excel, clean them up - including emails - then reimport them.

Then, a simpleminded approach is to use Sage Intelligence to dump the contacts to excel depending on past due, include the balance (calc field in SI), and use the excel data to feed Office 365 mail merge. Invite them to pay from the customer portal (Sage/cimcloud or cc vendor's).

Use the same approach to dump phone # on those past 60 days (or whatever) to call. 

At some point, personalized calling and talking is needed. If they're not responding to monthly statement with link to Click2Pay, the CFO has a sales problem ...

And this is exactly the problem that Sage's coming AR Automation tool is designed to handle.

Some years back, we did this with Sage Alerts.  You can use Visual Cut as well.  We did merges using information from the various tables that @Doug Higgs mentions above.  We used Acess PTQ's and SQRY's to do the heavy lifting.  Primary use was mailing out invoices every night as Paperless office was a snail emailing.  We also used SA for mailing customer statements every Sunday to territory salesmen.  We also consolidated AR and sales reports for four Sage companies.  Powerful stuff, but somewhat techie.  It would be nice to have simpler to use functionality baked in as @Doug Higgs and @Wayne Schulz are requesting.  But hey, this is SAGE 100.  Need something robust like INTAACT for easy to use features.

Yes... the email address to use is always a complication.  I've done a SQL view to extract Paperless settings for use with external reporting, but obviously that only works for a Premium system.

I have had several of my customers ask if there was a way to create email letters to their customers.  Sage 100 has the customer emails in paperless office, customer maintenance, contacts, etc. and there is no good way to get a simple list or to create a mail merge.  This seems like it would be of considerable value to have.