Microsoft Idea

Allow the use of Contacts in Document Layouts

Colin Raden on 5/2/2020 1:05:48 PM

The way that Document Layouts function in the system have worked OK all along, but their inflexibility is always exposed when our customers ask "can we choose existing contacts for this customer (or vendor) that by default are selected when emailing?" or "can we pick and choose who the document is emailed to at that specific point in time?"

In addition to the existing functionality where users can manually enter more than one email address for a customer/vendor/bank document layout there are two ways to approach this:

1. Add a field to the Document Layout table called "Contact No." that, when setting up Document Layouts for a Customer/Vendor/Bank allows a user to specify the contacts belonging to that customer/vendor/bank that are defaulted into the document layout when it gets emailed to that master record entity.

2. In addition to #1, at the point in time where a user does email a customer/vendor-facing document from Business Central using the Document Layouts they have configured (Email Confirmation, Post and Send invoice, etc.) - create a SETTING in the Relationship Management Setup page (or Document Sending Profiles page) that users can turn on or off. When turned on, the function should prompt users to choose the Person-type contacts under the customer/vendor master record entity that the document being emailed gets sent to. If Contact Nos. have been configured on the Document Layouts residing in the customer/vendor maser record, give users the control to remove those recipients when this prompt is displayed, as well as add new existing contacts under the entity, and also one-off email address (like what can be done today).

STATUS DETAILS

Needs Votes

Business Central Team (administrator)

Thank you for your feedback.

This suggestion seems to have been addressed (no exactly designed the way you described) in Wave 1 2020 Business Central release (16.0)

This is release item link for it https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2020wave1/dynamics365-business-central/enhanced-customer-vendor-document-layout

And here are additional details on picking contacts on document layouts: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/ui-define-customer-vendor-document-layouts#to-set-up-which-contact-receives-which-document-layout-for-a-customer

In latest release we do store selected contacts on document layouts in Selected Contacts Filter field on Document Layouts page (customer report layouts table).

You can use the by choosing Select emails from Contact action on Document Layouts page. This way you only maintain contact email on contact as if contact's email changes, it will automatically be show in document layouts page and on send email dialog.

The way to turn off the feature is to simply enter email manually, or leave it blank for user to fill it in on sent email dialog.

Thing still missing here, is a way to "bulk" select contacts without having to set it up for each customer/vendor document layout, however we're missing one capability still for client to do this (filtering on advances task pages - when we'd have that you could use job responsibilites flow filter to filter out contacts with specific job responsibility).

What I mean by this is... Contacts of type person can have job resonsibilities assigned to then. What I'd expect is that users would want a general document layout setup, where they could say, contacts with job resonsibility accountant get customer statements or contacts with account payable responsibility get sales invoices.

Then document layouts wouldn't need per customer / vendor setup, but you could set sort of a "policy" on company level on which contacts with specific job responsibilites gets which documents.

Also document layouts can be used like initially intended to handle exceptions for such "policy".

Let me know if I can close current idea and consider adding new one for proposed above 😊

Sincerely,

Ivan Koletic

PM, Microsoft