Mekashron Call Center Software is designed to make all your business management easy, so it comes with a full set of documents that can be customized with your logo and details for immediate use, including invoices, receipts and more.
This section will show you all the useful documents that come with Mekashron Call Center Software, how to set them up for first use, how to add your own documents if you need different ones for your specific business, and how to use the documents in your sales process.
In this chapter we assume that you have successfully installed Mekashron, that you have set up your entities, and that you have performed your sales set up, including adding your products to the Mekashron inventory. We also assume that you are familiar with the Sales tab of an entity - in other words you know how to create orders. You may also wish to review the part of the manual on the Mekashron Editor in the Campaign chapter.
1 - Default Documents
To access the Documents Management portion of Mekashron Call Center Software, select Sales from the main menu, then Settings -> Documents:
Figure 1.1 - Accessing Documents Management in Mekashron
The Documents Management screen looks like this:
Figure 1.2 - The Documents Management screen
Immediately you can see the default documents that are pre-installed for you with your Mekashron Call Center Software application:
- Price Quote
- Invoice
- Receipt
- Refund Invoice
- Shipping Label
- Return Label
- Receipt Cancel
These pre-configured documents are effectively templates. The power of these documents is that you can create a document for any client or order and the copy of the document will be generated pre-filled with the client’s details and the order details. We will see exactly how this works later in this section.
To view each of these documents, either double-click on it or select it and click on the View/Edit button. This will open up the Mekashron Editor; note that the functionality of the Editor is fully documented in the Campaign Chapter:The Mekashron Editor.
Each of the standard documents is set up in a typical way with all the fields that you are likely to want to use for your business. You can of course customize them, as we will see next.
2 - Customizing Documents
When you are first setting up Mekashron for use in your business, this is the ideal time to customize your documents and add any additional documents that you may need for your business processes.
One of the powerful functions that Mekashron offers you is the ability to have a full set of business documents that are maintained in one place as a complete set of templates ready for you to use at any time throughout your sales process.
In this section we will show you how to take an existing Mekashron-supplied template document and customize it. We will do this as an example and this will give you the ability to then perform these tasks with your own documents and for your own unique business requirements.
Below is an example of a Mekashron-supplied document in print preview:
Figure 2.1 - A Default Mekashron Document (Shipping Label)
As you can see, this example is a Shipping Label. Let us suppose that you wish to make the following alterations to the Shipping Label for your own specific business:
1. Insert your logo at the top right of the document
2. Add the Order Date next to the Order #
Inserting Your Logo: To replace the word Logo with your actual Logo, in the edit mode of the Mekashron Editor, first use your mouse to select the word Logo, and then either select Insert -> Picture from the menu, or click on the equivalent button in the toolbar:
Figure 2.2 - The Insert Picture Button
You will be presented with the following dialog box:
Figure 2.3 - Browsing to Select a Picture
Now click on Browse and navigate to the location of your logo.
If you leave the alignment as the default, Baseline, then your logo will simply be aligned to the right just as the text is before you replace it.
You may wish to have a border around your logo; if so, enter a value (e.g. 1) in the Border Thickness box:
Figure 2.4 - Adding a Border
The Alternate Text and Spacing fields are optional fields that advanced users may wish to alter.
When you click OK, Mekashron will insert your picture instead of the text reading Logo.
Adding the Order Date: To add the Order Date to the right of the Order #, click on the document at the appropriate place and type “Order Date:”. Then highlight this text and make it bold using the appropriate button:
Figure 2.5 - The Bold Button
Next, place a space after the text you have just entered and then click on the Macro button. Select the Sale Fields tab and then choose Order Date …
Figure 2.6 - Inserting the Order Date Field
… when you click OK, your change will look like this:
Figure 2.7 - The Text after inserting Order Date next to Order #
So your document with the changes you have made now looks like this:
Figure 2.8 - The Shipping Label after Customization
And your document in Preview mode looks like this:
Figure 2.9 - The Customized Shipping Label in Preview Mode
As you can see, with the powerful functionality of the Mekashron Editor and the Macros which enable you to insert data fields, you can customize the existing documents to exactly match your requirements.
3 - New Documents
We have just seen how to customize an existing document. If you have unique documents that you use in your business and you wish to create them as templates in Mekashron so that you can easily use them in your business processes, this is also straightforward.
As an example, we will create a new Document Type called “Reminder”. This will be a standard letter than we can use to send out to our clients if they are late in paying for their order.
First, we go to the Documents Management screen (Sales -> Settings -> Documents from the Main Mekashron Menu):
Figure 3.1 - The Documents Management Screen
… and click on the Add Document button.
This brings up the Mekashron Editor with a new, blank document:
Figure 3.2 - A New Document in the Editor
For full details of all you can do in the Mekashron Editor to set up your new document, see the section titled The Mekashron Editor. We will cover some of the important functions in this example.
Adding Text: To add text to your new document, simply start typing as you would with any editing program. Bold, italic, font and alignment options are available via the icons and menus.
Here we have added and formatted some text to our new “Reminder” document:
Figure 3.3 - Adding Text to a New Document
Adding Data Fields: To add Data Fields, click on the Macro button:
Figure 3.4 - The Macro Button
… and then select the fields you want to add from one of the tabs.
Let’s add the customer’s name to the letter by going into the Macro screen and selecting FirstName, clicking OK, then going back in and selecting LastName and clicking OK.
Figure 3.5 - Adding the Name Fields to the Document
Our document now looks like this:
Figure 3.6 - New Document with Formatting and Data Fields
In a similar way we can add our company address using the fields on the Business Fields tab of the Macro, and specific details about the order from the Sale Fields tab, and so on.
You can also add data fields to the Subject of the document in the same way. Here is a completed subject line for the "Reminder" document:
Figure 3.7 - A Customized Subject Field
Adding a Products Table: In addition to single data fields, you can use the Macro function to insert a table showing all of the products that relate to the order when you generate your document.
- After placing your mouse cursor at the location where you wish to insert a product table, click on the Macro button.
- Select the Sales tab and click on the Products Table option.
Figure 3.8 - The Products Table Option
- Click OK to insert the table
Here is our document with the Products Table inserted:
Figure 3.9 - The Products Table in Our New Document
Note that another option that works in a similar way is the Payments Table, which like the Products Table is on the Sales tab of the Macro screen. This function inserts a similar table but this time with the information on all the payments that relate to the order.
Saving Your New Document Type: To save your document as a new Document Type, click on the Save button. Mekashron will prompt you to name your document:
Figure 3.10 - Saving a New Document Type
… and then your new document type will be shown in the Document List and will be available to add to your clients / entities – something that we shall see how to do in the next part of this chapter.
4 - Adding Documents to an Entity, and Creating Copies
Once you have set up all the documents just as you want them for your business, the power of Mekashron for managing your sales processes is really unleashed.
With a few clicks you can add any of your documents to an entity and Mekashron will fill all of the details in for you automatically.
Let’s see how this works with an example.
In the screenshot below we are viewing an Order for a Client:
Figure 4.1 - An Order in Mekashron
As you can see, there is a Documents section at the bottom of the screen, where your standard document templates are listed, in addition to any new custom documents you have added - in the screenshot we can see the Reminder document that we set up earlier.
Let us say we have taken the order but Green Widget No 3 is not in stock, so we only want to ship the other two items on the order at this stage. So let's see how to print a Shipping Label for these two products.
Mekashron makes this very simple to do. Simply select the products you wish to ship…
Figure 4.2 - Selecting Products for Shipping
… and then click the Shipping Label button in the Documents section of the screen, and choose from the options of Print, Send by Fax or Send by Email.
Figure 4.3 - Printing a Shipping Label
Assuming that you DO have the Print Preview checkbox selected...
Figure 4.4 - The Print Preview Option for Documents
...then Mekashron will open the document in Preview mode for you to check, and from here you can print it out.
In print preview, our shipping label for the two products looks like this:
Figure 4.5 - The Shipping Label in Preview Mode
Notice in the screenshot above how Mekashron has fully populated the document with all the information about both the client and the order. Also, notice that in the document that is generated we can see the alterations we made to the Shipping Label document earlier - the logo we inserted at the top right of the document and the extra Order Date field.
If you choose the Fax option then Mekashron automatically puts the document into a format suitable for faxing.
When we close our preview screen after printing our shipping label, we can see that Mekashron is now showing an icon of a red and green lorry next to the products that have been shipped, while the item that was out of stock is still showing an open box icon.
Figure 4.6 - Mekashron marks products that have been shipped with a lorry icon
Let’s say we now want to send our client an invoice for the two products that we have just shipped.
Again - simply select the two products you wish to invoice for…
Figure 4.7 - Selecting Products for Invoicing
… and then click the Invoice button in the Documents section of the screen, and choose from the options of Print, Send by Fax or Send by Email.
Figure 4.8 - Creating an Invoice
Here the Print Preview of our invoice:
Figure 4.9 - An Invoice in Print Preview.
When we close our preview screen after printing our invoice, we can see that Mekashron is now showing an icon of a blue invoice icon next to the products that have been invoiced.
Figure 4.10 - Mekashron marks products that have been invoiced with an invoice icon
To continue with our example, let us say that the invoice we sent has become overdue and we wish to send our client a Reminder.
To do this we will again select the two products that we invoiced earlier, and select the icon for the Reminder in the Documents tab:
Figure 4.11 - Generating a Reminder Document
... Mekashron generates our Reminder, automatically populating all of the custom fields that we set up when we created this document type, including the products table:
Figure 4.12 - A Reminder in Print Preview
Let us say that our client has now paid for the two products we have invoiced him for (for step-by-step instructions on taking payment and creating Receipt documents, please refer to Receiving a Payment in the Create Orders part of this chapter), but later our client decides he wishes to return Green Widget No 2 for a refund. We can handle this just as easily. We will select only the affected item and then click the Refund Invoice icon to auto-generate the documentation that we need to fulfil the refund request.
We can view any standard documents that we have created for an item on the order by right clicking on the icon next to the line item. So for our Green Widget No 2 item we now have an Invoice, a Shipping Label and a Refund Invoice, which we can view, or print another copy of, at any time:
Figure 4.13 - Mekashron lets you easily view documents that were previously created for this order
Note that only standard Mekashron-supplied documents show in this contextual menu - new document types that you create, such as the Reminder document we set up in our example, do not show in this list, but you can access these via the Documents List (see next).
5 - The Documents List
In addition to viewing documents that have been created for an entity through the entity form, you can also search or list documents from the Documents List.
In the Documents List screen you can search on documents. Here you have the option of Printing, Faxing or Emailing a document just as you can from within the Entity that a document belongs to. You can even print multiple documents at once by selecting all of the documents that you want and then using the Make a Copy button. For example, your accounts department may have a procedure to go and print all invoices at the end of the day or week for filing purposes.
For full details on using the Documents List functions, please see the Manage Orders chapter.
6 - Summary
As you have seen, the Documents Management functions within Mekashron Call Center Software are extremely powerful, customizable yet easy to use.