Letter Writing is a good way to quickly communicate with your customers and vendors. Notify customers of:

• Special promotions
• Items they may want to reorder based on their order history
• Thank-you letters to first time customers
• Letters to customers who haven't ordered in a while
• Letters from Credit regarding open invoices
• Notification to customers/vendors of your address/phone/email changes

Letter Writing works a lot like a word processing program.  It is interactive with customer/vendor masters and is capable of pulling specific fields and inserting them into a letter with little data entry.  New letters may be entered and existing letters written in other Windows word processing software may be copied and pasted into this option.

When adding a letter, various fields from the customer master may be indicated for inserting data specific for the letter.  Graphical images may also be inserted into letters.  Normally, the "Insert as character" option should be used for this.  Once the letter is finished, the Mail Merge options allow for several sorting capabilities to determine which customers to whom the letter should be sent.  Within Letter Writing's page setup, you may change the page orientation from portrait to landscape and change the margins to suit your needs.  Margins and tab sizes may be changed for individual letters under format/paragraph.

When creating a letter, format the letter just as you would an actual letter.  Use the "insert" option to insert fields which represent actual data which will be obtained from the customer/contact masters, open invoices or order history.  As in the following example:

The majority of the fields from the customer and contact master files may be inserted into letters, including, but not exclusively:

• Name/Address
• Customer #
• Customer/Contact name
• Phone #/Fax
• Birthday
• Salutation
• First/Last order date
• Salesperson
• A/R bal
• Sales amt

If creating a letter, such as a past-due invoice reminder, the following fields of information are available from the customer's A/R open invoices:

If creating a letter, such as a reorder reminder, you may chose to insert order history records.  The following fields will then be available for insertion into the letter based on the customer's order history information:

If any of the above fields are inserted into the letter, the following sort/select options will be available:

Letter Writing may be found in the Graphics Menu under: Customer Menu, Extra, Letter Writing or in the Treeview Menu under Receivables/Customer, Reporting

Letters may be emailed, faxed or printed.  If you need labels for envelopes, you can run the Mailing Label program using the same sort and selection criteria that was used for the letters.