How do I email a purchase order to my vendor?

Does it take a long time to order parts over the phone?  Are you printing your purchase orders out just so you can fax them to your suppliers?  There is definitely an easier way!  Emailing purchase orders to your vendors takes seconds and frees you up for more important things.

Before you can email anything out of ESC, you'll need to make sure your outgoing mail settings have been entered.  If you have not done this already, please see our article Setup Email in ESC.

Emailing a Purchase Order

1. First, you'll need to open the purchase order you wish to email to your vendor. You can open a purchase order from the PO List or by entering the order number in the Search bar.
2. On the Activities toolbar, locate the Email button and click on it to open the Send Email screen.
   
   
   
   
3. When the Send Email screen opens, the transaction you had open on the screen will automatically appear at the bottom as a PDF attachment.
   
   
   
   
4. A vendor could have multiple locations under their record.  The first email address entered for that location will automatically appear in the To field of the Send Email screen.  All other email addresses for that location will appear in the drop down menu.
   
   
5. The From address of the Send Email screen will automatically be filled with the Display Name and Return Address that were entered into the Addresses tab of the System Setup → Email screen.  This can be changed by clicking on the word From and setting a new Display Name and Return Email Address.
6. You'll want to further compose your message to the vendor by filling in the Subject and Body of the Send Email screen with the information you want the vendor to see.  This information can be setup and automatically populated each time by setting up an Email Template.  See the Email Templates section for more information.
   
   
   
   
7. If you need to attach additional files, you can do so by clicking on the Insert File (paperclip) icon on the Send Email toolbar.  A Windows Explorer window will appear that allows you to navigate to the file that needs to be attached.
   
   
   
   
8. You will also have the option to 'Request a Read Receipt' so that you can be sure the recipient has not only received, but also read your message.  You'll do this by clicking on the Options button on the toolbar. The Read Receipt will be sent to the From address in the Send Email screen.
   
   
9. Once the Send Email screen has been filled out to your satisfaction, you'll need only to hit the Send button to send this email on its way to the recipient.
   Note: When you click Send, the screen will pause for a moment before disappearing.  Please do not click Send multiple times.  This occurs because the email is not being sent directly from ESC.  When an email is sent, ESC my log into your outgoing mail server and pass the message along.  This takes a few seconds to do and the Send Email screen will not disappear until ESC has received confirmation from the outgoing mail server that the message was sent successfully.  If the mail server returns an error, ESC will pass that error along to you so that you will know there is a problem.

Email Templates

A Template allows you to setup the Send Email window once and reuse that setup every time a transaction is sent from ESC.  Saving a Template will save the following fields:

• Carbon Copy (Cc)
• Blind Carbon Copy (Bcc)
• From
• Subject
• The Body

To create a new template...

1. Pull up a random purchase order and click the Email button to get to the Send Email screen.
2. Fill out the information that you want saved into the template (From, Subject, Body, etc.).
   
   
   
   
3. Click Save Template on the toolbar.
4. Give your template a name.
   
   
   
   
5. Select whether this template will be available to all users or to just you.  You can also choose to make this template the default for your user.  If you make this template your default template, then it will appear automatically every time an email is sent through this same screen.
   
   
   
   
6. Click OK.  

If you do not wish to actually send this email, you can now click the X at the top-right corner of the screen to exit the Send Email screen.  If you create multiple templates, you'll be able to select them from the Templates drop down menu on the toolbar.  Every user can setup their own default template so that the correct Reply address is used for that user each time they send an email.