Statement Letters

Personalized customer letter layouts can be designed and setup in this utility, that can later be regularly printed for a filtered customer selection in the standard and alternate languages from the Print Statement Letters utility.
Accounts Receivable "Standard" letters, as well as "Gentle" and "Firm" Dunning Letters can also be designed for collection notice purposes.
The layout of the A/R collection and dunning letters can be configured to include the customer account balance, and any overdue invoices as of a specified aging date, embedding the account information in the letter as explained below in the Letter Details.

An operator must be assigned a Security Role that allows permission to the Customer Management - Statement Letters in order to access this table.

The letters are personalized automatically by printing the Name, Address and Postal/ZIP Code from the Customer Information and the Salutation prints with the Contact Name from the Customer Information.

The Statement and Dunning letters can be generated manually through Print Statement Letters and can also be generated automatically for the appropriate over-due customers through the Automatic Reporting tasks using the function ARLT02 which automatically emails them to the customer Contacts flagged for receipt.

If your firm utilizes the alternate language feature for customers, parallel letter codes should be setup, one letter with text in the standard language and a second letter in the alternate language. When the letters are generated in Print Statement Letters two letter codes can be entered for the appropriate standard language and alternate language letters.
The alternate language processing can be activated from the Company Miscellaneous Parameters and customers can be flagged in the "Additional Information" of Customer Information. The alternate language fields for standard documents and Crystal Forms are setup in Document Field Labels that are used in the A/R aging that can be included in the letter.
For Jasper documents refer to Jasper Appearance and Formatting window of Customer Forms for the language and label controls.

The Statement and Dunning letters can also be generated automatically for the appropriate over-due customers through the Automatic Reporting tasks using the function ARLT02, and automatically emailing them to the Contacts flagged for receipt of Dunning Letters.

Letters that are generated can be tracked by date sent and reported using Statement Letter Report.

Dunning Letter features:

The overdue status on each invoice is controlled by the Terms on the invoice which defaults from the terms assigned to the customer in the Additional Information window in the Customer Information.
Two optional day count values have been added to the Terms Code table to determine when an over-due account becomes eligible to receive a gentle or a more firm dunning letter.
Once the content and layout is setup in this utility the dunning letter can be generated from Print Statement Letters using Jasper or standard forms, in primary and alternate languages, printing a hardcopy for mailing or directly emailing the Contacts flagged to receive ‘Dunning Letters’ for the customer.
The Statement and Dunning letters can also be generated automatically for the appropriate over-due customers through the Automatic Reporting tasks using the function ARLT02, emailing the Jasper form letter to the Contacts flagged for receipt of Dunning Letters.

Note: Because customers can be eligible and receive both a Gentle and a Firm Dunning Letter if there are overdue invoices in both periods, any invoices that are in the "Gentle" period and are included on the Gentle Dunning Letter, are NOT also included on the Firm Dunning Letter, and vice versa.

Reward Dollars:

When the Reward Dollar feature is activated, the LTD Reward Dollars Earned and the current Usable Reward Dollars can be printed on the Jasper statement, as this information is exported to XML.
Reward Dollar Statements can be generated separately from the Reward Dollar Statements option.
Refer to Reward Program for information on this feature.

The selection prompts to build the letters are:

LETTER NUMBER

Enter the code to identify this letter or select an existing letter from the drop-down box.
The maximum number of characters is 3 for the code.

DESCRIPTION

Enter a brief description of this letter to a maximum of 30 characters.

SALUTATION

Enter a Salutation to a maximum of 30 characters, to be printed on the letter below the Date.

The Salutation prints followed by the Contact Name from the Customer Information and a colon (:)
i.e. Attention Jack Crosby:
Note: If there is no Contact Name the Salutation and colon are still printed. i.e. Attention:

LETTER DETAILS

Click the DETAILS button to access the letter for this code, as follows:

Enter the body of the letter.
When printed from Print Statement Letters, the body of the letter will print as entered here, but without the sequence numbers.

For A/R collection letters and dunning letters, special insert values can be included in the letter to print the customer's account, balances and unpaid documents as part of the letter layout.
Either the << >> or the [[ ]] symbols can be used to bracket the insert identifiers, as some Web browsers do not always display the brackets properly.
The insert options include:

• <<ACCT>> or [[ACCT]]
  If <<ACCT>> or [[ACCT]] is included in the Statement Letters, then the customer's account number or alternate account number where applicable, prints at that point in the letter.

  i.e. "Account <<ACCT>> is overdue for payment."

• <<BALANCE>> or [[BALANCE]]
  If <<BALANCE>> or [[BALANCE]] is included on a line in the body of the letter, then the customer's full unpaid account balance as of the aging date, prints at that point in the letter.

  i.e. In the letter setup in Statement Letters the text could be:
  "Your current account balance is <<BALANCE>>. Please remit payment."

  The software would substitute the correct balance and this would print in Print Statement Letters as:
  "Your current account balance is $2603.74. Please remit payment."

• <<OVERDUE>> or [[OVERDUE]]
  This insert option acts similar to <<BALANCE>> except that only selected invoices are reflected in the total that prints.
  If <<OVERDUE>> or [[OVERDUE]] is included on a line in the body of the letter, then the sum of the unpaid invoices as of the aging date is printed at that point in the letter, basing the included invoice selection on whether the letter is a Standard, Gentle or Firm Dunning letter, as it only displays the sum of overdue invoices that fall into the dunning period dictated by the customer's Terms Codes.
  For information on how invoices are determined as overdue for Gentle versus Firm Dunning Letters, refer to the explanation in the Terms Codes.

• <<AR>> or [[AR]]
  If <<AR>> or [[AR]] is entered on a line of its own in the body of the letter, then the unpaid invoices as of the aging date are listed, with Invoice #, Date, Due Date, Invoice Amount, and outstanding Invoice Balance.

  Note: If <<AR>> is used in the body of a letter that is selected in Print Statement Letters to print a Gentle or Firm Dunning Letter, only the invoices applicable to the Firm or Gentle period are listed.
  The total of these invoices then matches the <<OVERDUE>> balance calculated and printed in the same dunning letter.

Note: A window is provided on any blank detail line of the letter to outline the use of these insertion identifiers.

Finished?

Click the ACCEPT button to accept the letter contents and exit, or click the CANCEL button to abort.

Use Print Statement Letters to create the list of customers to receive the letters) and to print the confirmed letters.