Send documents and emails

You can easily share information and documents, such as sales and purchase orders and invoices, by email directly from Business Central, without having to open an email app.

You can send almost all types of documents as PDF attachments. Alternatively, you can set up a report layout that includes information from the document in the email text, along with text that makes the email more friendly, for example, a standard greeting. For more information, see Managing Report and Document Layouts.

When you send invoices, you can make it easier for customers to make payments through a payment service, such as PayPal, by automatically adding information and a link to the service in the email. For more information, see Enable Customer Payments Through Payment Services.

To enable emails from within Business Central, start the Set Up Email assisted setup guide. For more information, see Set Up Email.

Note

Note:
Business Central supports only outbound email communications. You cannot also receive replies from within the app.

To send documents by email

This procedure describes how attach a posted sales invoice to an email as a PDF file, and with document-specific email text. The steps are the same for other documents.

  1. Choose the Lightbulb that opens the Tell Me feature. icon, enter Posted Sales Invoices, and then choose the related link.

  2. Select the invoice, choose the Print/Send action, and then choose Send by Email.

  3. In the Email field, choose Yes (Prompt for Settings). For more information, see Set Up Document Sending Profiles.

    If the Email field on the Send Document to page is set to Yes (Prompt for Settings), then the Send Email page opens pre-filled with the contact person in the To: field and the document attached as a PDF file. In the Body field, you can either enter text manually or you can have the field filled with a document-specific email body that you have set up.

  4. Choose the OK button.

  5. In the To: field, enter a valid email address. The default value is the customer email address.

  6. In the Subject field, enter a descriptive subject text. The default value is the customer name and invoice number.

  7. In the Attachment field, the generated invoice is attached by default as a PDF file.

  8. In the Body field, enter a short message to the recipient.

    If a document-specific email text is set up on the Report Selection - Sales page, the Body field is filled in automatically. For more information, see Set Up Reusable Email Texts and Layouts.

  9. Choose the OK button to send the email message.

Note

Note:
If you do not want to specify email settings each time you email a document, you can select the Yes (Use Default Settings) option in the Email field on the Send Document to page. In that case, the Send Email page will not open. See Step 4. For more information, see Set Up Document Sending Profiles.

To compose and send an email

You can quickly compose emails for contacts, customers, vendors, salespeople/purchasers, and bank accounts directly from the pages for those entities. Just choose Process, and then Send Email to open the email editor. For bank accounts, the Send Email action is under Actions.

Tip

Tip:
If you often send email messages that are similar in nature, or want to send a bulk communication, for example, to advertise a sales campaign, using Word templates with email can speed up the process. You can create a template for an entities such as customers, vendors, and contacts, that will generate the content of an email message for you, and even personalize the content for the recipient based on data in Business Central. For more information, see Use Word Templates for Bulk Communication.

Attach a document to an email

There are several ways to attach documents to emails.

If you're assigned to an email scenario related to the entity you're sending the email to, or the document you're sending, an attachment might be automatically added to your message. That's because a default attachment has been assigned to the email scenario. You can delete the attachment if you don't want to send it with your message. For more information, see Assign Email Scenarios to Email Accounts.

To attach a file yourself, in the email editor, use the following actions:

  • Choose Add file to select a file.
  • Choose Add files from default selection to manually add a file that's associated with the email scenario.
  • Choose Add file from source document to choose a file that's attached to the document you're working with. The files are either attached to the document itself, or one or more of its lines.

Documents marked as printed when they are sent

Some documents in Business Central have a field that specifies how many times the document has been printed. The number in that field is also updated if you send the document by email because a PDF file is generated for it. The number is updated even if you don't send the email.

Sent emails and your email outbox

Business Central stores the emails that you send on the Sent Items page. That's to let you resend emails, or forward them to someone else. If you can't find an email in your sent items, look for it on the Email Outbox page.

Note

Note:
Depending on the extension that your company uses for email, administrators can see a list of messages that everyone has sent, but not the content of the messages

The Email Outbox is where you'll find the emails that you saved as drafts, and emails that failed to send, for example, if the email address was invalid. For messages that failed to send, you can choose Show Error or Investigate Error to troubleshoot the problem.

See also

Managing Report and Document Layouts
Set up Email
Invoice Sales
Work with Business Central

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