Hello, is someone able to help, please. I send remittance advices by email but go through a turtuous route as Sage says 'the email options are not fully configured', so I send them as attachments, which is takes time.
I've tried to configure email on Sage Instants also. I think you need to have Outlook to be able to email straight from Sage. I don't so cannot do it. There are help menu's that tell you how to set it all up.
It should be more or less the same procedure in Instant Plus as it is in Sage 50.
Most of the following is a copy and paste job from a post I made last year answering a question of how to send statements, which I've obviously edited for remittance advices...
Setting up Sage 50 to send stuff out by email (and not using Outlook) is relatively painless.
The first thing you should do is tell Sage your own email address - although this is one of Sage's little sillies (especially for a multi-company set up) but don't worry about that for the moment. This is set by going to Settings on the top menu => Company Preferences, and entering the email address you wish to use in the Email box on the Details tab.
That was the easy bit.
Next up, Sage needs to know how to send the email - your outgoing (SMTP) server details. This is done from within the report generator. Since you're wanting to send remittances by email, you may as well go in through the remittance screen: select a payment for which a remittance needs to be sent, click on Print and select the layout that you are going to use when emailing them: Select it, and click on Edit.
When the report generator comes up, on the menu bar click on Tools => Options and go to the Email Setup tab. Change the default provider to SMTP.
In the "Available Providers" box below that, click on "SMTP" and then "Configure" and you'll get a window called "SMTP Configuration" in which you enter all the necessary information:
"Server Name" is the name of your outgoing mail server (which you should have set up somewhere in your email program in order to send email).
"Port" will normally be 25
Under Sender details you need to enter the email address (yes, the one you've already set up in the main program) and the name that will be used along with it (or a post title, like "Bookkeeper" etc)
Finally, there are the log-in details for your outgoing mail server, which will typically require that you select "Use username and password" and enter the, erm, user name and password used to log-in to the outgoing server.
Click "Ok" to close the window, and then (if you like) click "Test" in the Options window: You'll be prompted to enter an address to which a test email can be sent. If that test email is received at that address, you'll know it's working, so the Options window can be Okayed to close it.
Now, for the remittance you wish to send by email, you may need to tweak some items in the email properties. If the properties aren't showing, click on View => Properties. Somewhere in the list that appears will be an field called Email properties; click on that to open the report-specific email stuff.
If it's a report that's already set up for email, some stuff will already be filled in - such as the "To" field, which should contail the PURCHASE_LEDGER.E_MAIL variable (or if it's a recent version, you might be using PURCHASE_LEDGER.E_MAIL2 or even ...3 specifically for remittances).
"From" can be set to contain the from name and email address - eg "Fred Bloggs" which will pick the address up from the main program's company settings.
(Only a couple of versions back, either this field wasn't there or there was no variable - I forget the exact situation - so it would only use the address set up in the report generator email settings, and if you were running a multi-company version of Sage, so had a different email address for each company, the report generator settings were "one size fits all". That meant it would only ever use the one address, no matter which company you were sending from. And in some situations with the 2013 version, this silly problem does still apply).
Above "From" is "CC", and I always send a copy of any reports like statements to the company email address that I receive myself. I started doing that after I encountered an incredibly stupid bug in the way Sage handles email a couple of years ago, which they've subsequently "fixed" - in quotes, because when I reported the bug to them, the support drone vocalised a possible fix on the phone to me that made me want to facepalm. (And I have very recently encountered it again - so I was right to facepalm!)
You can also change the subject line to something more meaninful than the default.
Below that, you specifiy the format the report is to be sent in - I usually opt for PDF - and below that, you can specify the filename.
Finally, the bottom box allows you to specify the way the remittance is to be sent; set it to send immediately, by SMTP.
Okay that, save the report.
In theory, you should now be able to send statements by email.
It could also be worth setting up a filter for the report (Report menu -> Filters) with something like:
PURCHASE_LEDGER.E_MAIL NOT LIKE ""
What that does is ignore remittances - ie don't even try to send them - if there is no email address set up. (Obviously, the specific variable should match the one that's being sent to).
If you select (say) ten remittances, and the first four are to suppliers with email addresses, the fifth isn't, and the remaining five are, without a filter like that Sage will send the first four, get to the fifth and complain: the remaining five won't be sent. (But because the report generator is a separate program, as far as the remittance screen is concerned, it will mark them *all* as sent!)
I think that should just about cover everything.
__________________
Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
Thank you for a wonderful answer but I can't get far down your explanation without hitting a wall! My Sage was set up by someone who knew my limitations. I don't see 'report generator' My remittances come up when I hit send remittance but there is no 'print' button. Things don't happen as you say they will, story of me and Sage I'm afraid. I guess I'll just have to plod on as I am. Thank You anyway.
It sounds like you're using a version which is a few years old.
I can't remember when the change happened, but up until a point remittance advices were sent from the supplier payment screen - you enter the payment details, allocate the invoices, and click the "Send remittance" button at the bottom before clicking on "Save".
However, in more recent versions, that button is not there - instead, there is an option somewhere to create remittance advices when supplier payments are entered. Once you've entered all the supplier payments, you go to the bank screen (well, actually, you'd be there already having been entering supplier payments), and click on a "Remittance" button along the top; all the pending remittance advices would then be listed, so you can select one or more and send them.
(This new approach is good for paying people by BACS or whatever, but stupid if you have to write a batch of cheques!)
My description was based on the new way of doing things.
I don't have an old enough version around to check how things were, but I'll try to suggest from memory where I think things will differ from what I wrote.
First of all, where I mentioned the report generator. You might not "see" it, but it's there. It's a separate program that comes as part of the package, and is what Sage uses to produce any reports - anything that you might print out or send out by email; customer statements, supplier remittances, your P&L report and so on. Whenever you make sage produce such a report, you are running the report generator - and usually, there are options to print, preview, save/export or edit the report. Though the way those options are presented has been known to change from one version to another - and sometimes it's inconsistent *within* any given version of the software!
With that in mind, when I said:
"Since you're wanting to send remittances by email, you may as well go in through the remittance screen: select a payment for which a remittance needs to be sent, click on Print and select the layout that you are going to use when emailing them: Select it, and click on Edit."
That's clearly not going to work for you, since you don't have "the remittance screen".
You could run the report generator manually (which I think was probably on one of the menus along the top, or possibly one of the toolbar icons in older versions - but I really can't remember), and find the report (remittance layout) in question, but there's probably more than one, and you have to find the right one; the one you are using.
The easiest way should be to do it from an actual payment; so do it as you go in to make a supplier payment. When you've entered it, and before clicking on Save - i.e. when you normally click the "Send remittance" button. Before clicking that button, check if there are options to print/preview/save/edit somewhere on the screen; if there are, choose "Edit", then click on the "Send remittance" button. If there aren't, go ahead and click on the button, and look for the options on the next screen.
Note that as well as taking the form of option boxes (where only one of them can be selected/ticked) they might also take the form of a small pop-up menu; the box will say (eg) "Print" and clicking on the menu icon will allow you to choose one of the others).
(They should either be on the same screen as the button or on the next - that much, at least, has always been reasonably consistent, because wherever Sage allows you to print a report, it also allows you to preview it, export it - or edit it).
Once you've got the editor up, hopefully, what I've written will be broadly right - though some things will undoubtedly differ slightly. (Actually, the emailing mechanism has varied over the years as well, but I'm pretty sure it's had an SMTP option for quite some time.)
__________________
Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
