Outgoing documents are an essential part of any ERP application. The internal process can be so advanced and user-friendly supported by the software, but if it cannot produce a good invoice, it is not good software.
Business card
Outgoing invoices, order confirmations, purchase orders. They are the company's business card. The information on them should be correct and the layout should be professional. With an invoice sent to the wrong address or with incorrect information, you make a bad impression and risk non-payment or late payment.
Microsoft Word
Nowadays software developers can format beautiful documents with - after a number of iterations - a layout that is to your liking. The disadvantage, however, is that whenever anything needs to be changed, a developer is always needed, because you can't do it yourself. This problem does not occur when your ERP system has a direct link to Word. This offers optimum ease of use. Only Microsoft Word knowledge is needed to lay out the documents. Font, color, position, logo, tables, individual text, frames, all just like you do in Word! Displaying the underlying data on the document can be done with two mouse clicks. Only condition is that this data is made available in Word.
Datasets
Making the underlying data available must be done by a developer from the software vendor; you as a customer cannot do that yet. Again, that seems like a disadvantage, but it is actually an advantage! After all, customers operating in the same specific industry want the same data on the outgoing documents for 95%. The differences between these customers' underlying datasets will be minimal. So that provides an opportunity to standardize these datasets. And if the software vendor knows your industry well, they will also know from experience what information should be displayed on the outgoing documents.
In short, being able to format outgoing documents from your ERP system in a simple and user-friendly way is extremely important. If you would like to know more about this, feel free to contact us.
Peter Gerhardt is Senior Lead Consultant Logistics at Dysel and helps customers achieve maximum results with its business software.
