Outgoing documents are an essential part of any ERP application. No matter how advanced and user-friendly the internal process has been supported by the software, it is no good software as long as you cannot produce a proper invoice from the system.
Your business card
Outgoing invoices, order confirmations, purchase orders. These are the company’s business cards. The information on it should be correct and the layout should be professional. By sending your invoice to the wrong address or with incorrect information on it, you leave a bad impression and you run the risk that the invoice will be paid too late or not paid at all.
Microsoft Word
Nowadays, software developers are able to create beautiful documents with - after several iterations - a layout that is in line with your preferences. The drawback is that if there is anything you would like to change you will need the developer, because you cannot do it yourself. This problem does not occur when your ERP system is directly connected to Word. Because that provides you with an optimal user experience. For working on the layout of the documents you just need to know Microsoft Word. Font, color, position, logo, tables, text, frames, all of this is done in Word! Getting the underlying data correctly on the document is arranged with two mouse clicks. The only condition is that the data has been made available in Word.
Datasets
Making the underlying data available in Word is something that should be done by a developer of your software vendor, this cannot be done by you as a customer. That might seem like another drawback, but it is actually a huge benefit! After all, for customers who are active in the same specific industry, it is likely that about 95% of the data on the documents is the same. The differences between the underlying datasets of these customers will be minimal. This provides the opportunity to standardize these datasets. And if the software vendor knows your industry well, he will be able to judge based on his experience what information needs to be shown on the outgoing documents.
In short, a simple and user-friendly way to format the outgoing documents of your ERP system is extremely important. If you would like to learn more about this, please feel free to contact me.
Peter Gerhardt is Senior Lead Consultant Logistics at Dysel and helps customers achieve maximum results with business software.
