Send automatic statements

Document Output can create and automatically send statements to your customers. Yóu can set up a range of profiles for statements to cover different requirements and preferences to best suit each of your customers.

Enable automatic statements for a customer

You can access the setup page for Statements from the Customer card. The Document Output FactBox shows the current setup for statements, and you can change the settings using the "..." option at Automatic Documents, which opens the Document Output Customer Card.

Under the Statement FastTab in the Document Output customer card,

• Change the Automatic statement option from Manual to Automatic.
• Set a specific date to start sending statements at First statement start date.
• From the option for Send Statement Code, use Select from full list to see the full details of each send code.

Work with send statement codes

Send Statement Codes shows a list with combinations of conditions and periods for sending statements. Document Output is set up with some commonly used combinations, and you can create more combinations with custom codes as you need them. In the full list of send statement codes, you'll see the conditions set for each code in the Send statement if column. You can combine these conditions to create the best-suited statement for individual customers.

• Entries during the period
• Balance during the period
• Balance due during the period

Options in the Period Date Formula column are set using standard Business Central date formats. For example, in the image below the options all show either 14 days or 1 month.

Email template and output profile

The Email Template Code column must show Statement for any line that you will use. To set up automatic sending, change the Output to Email. You could also choose not to email the statements, and instead collect these for later reference in a Journal.

Options to pause, skip or leave a buffer period

Additional options on this setup page allow you to be quite specific about when to send statements automatically, or to skip or pause sending.

• Create buffer periods to allow for payment of balances, by entering a negative number of days in the column, Send statement if Balance Due Date Formula.
• Skip sending a statement if the customer has negative balance, by adding a checkmark at Do not send if negative balance.
• Pause automatic sending of statements if the customer has been issued a reminder or finance charge, by adding checkmarks at Change to manual on Finance Charge Memo and/or Change to manual on Reminder. Both of these columns have checkmarks by default.

Update a group of customers

If most of your customers need the same automatic statement settings, you can set this up quickly using the Update Customer settings in Document Output's Customer Setup List. New customers added to Business Central use these chosen settings as the default.

You must enable the option to Change Existing setup to push this change to existing customer setups. After this, you can still change the statement setup for individual customers as needed. The Filter option allows you to apply different setups to selected groups.

Scenario

In this scenario video, Ester, the bookkeeper at Cronus, has been asked to set up automatic statements for two customers.

She needs to work on these tasks:

• For one customer, set up statements to show the entries for the last 2 weeks.
• For another customer, set up monthly statements to show balance due (with a 5 day buffer), but skip sending statements if there is a negative balance.

Other resources

More learning resources for this topic include:

• Generating Statements Automatically (Continia Docs article)
• Automatic email sending (Solution Demo video)
• Entering dates and times in Business Central (Microsoft Learn article)