This article is relevant if you would like to use NetSuite to generate an email to remind your customers of invoices which are late and provide a convenient way for them to get at source documents.
Background
We recently helped a client with a new NetSuite customer statement format that incorporated both customer deposit information and included a statement on the final pages of the invoice. See my article Yes You Can: Generate a NetSuite Customer Statement on an Invoice with Customer Deposit Accounting.
We were able to produce advanced invoice generation leveraging the power of our Content Renderer Engine (CRE) which is available to all of our clients license free. I suggest reviewing previous articles on how to push beyond NetSuite’s provided mechanisms of Advance PDF templates.
More recently, the client sought to produce a “Late Invoice Reminder” and only send communications to their customers when it was relevant. There are times the client wants to send this on demand which can easily be triggered from the customer record. But more importantly, the client sought to have rules about the frequency they would send a notice and control the distribution in a hands-free automated fashion.
How to use NetSuite to Generate Late Invoice Reminders Automatically
I spoke in depth about how to batch generate NetSuite documents. The goal here is to produce an email message that gently reminds the customer of outstanding invoices and help them get to the specific documents they may need. See related image to understand the message.
The key innovation is to use building blocks of previous work to get to the desired outcome. Since the invoices were crafted using the Content Renderer Engine, we now just need a way to produce a batch of them according the scope.
In this case, we will use a scheduled workflow that looks for situations where there are invoices that are overdue. We will also look at the last time we communicated with the customer so we don’t annoy them with too many messages. From this, we can produce a batch request to generate each invoice, place them in a specific NetSuite file cabinet, and then mark each file to allow anonymous access. We then can get the hyperlink of each invoice pdf file so that we can provide it to our customer in an email message. With the data structures, we have everything we need to craft a beautiful message.
Enhanced NetSuite Cash Collection Efforts
The client had a major success the very first month it was deployed. Many of the client’s customers indicated they were missing invoices and they appreciated it was easy for them to get to the source documents. The client was ecstatic because they did not have to respond to each customer request one-by-one as the solution effectively was ‘self-serve’. In short order, the overall age of receivables were reduced. Management was impressed with the Accounting Department’s ability to invent and improve cash flow.
Get the Solution
The solution is an illustration of the many types of NetSuite innovations we offer our clients. Our goal is to see our clients succeed and we happily give our clients our tools as a commitment to producing value. If you want to get in front of your customer communications and accounting operations, let’s have a conversation.
Hi Marty, Can this be done on a subsidiary controlled basis? (Either Global Admin controls subsidiary owner preference or they can update the preference themselves worst case.
Thank you for publish this article. Its hard to believe there is not an out of the box solution for such basic AR control
Hello Sarah,
Because we take control over the entire situation, we can easily build preference information into the Subsidiary or user record to drive it however required.
Marty