Subtitles of the Movie

QuickBooks makes it very easy to customize letters and Mail Merge them for a Customers, Vendors and even Employees, as with our collection letters we'll go to the Company Menu and down to Prepare Letter with Envelopes. Now you'll note that there are letter that are preset for customers for vendors and for employees. For instance if I go to the Employee Center and hit Next you'll see that it allows me to immediately go into a Birthday Letter, Sick Time or just a Memo. If I'd like to create a template on its own I can also do so. Let's talk about actually creating a template, now keep in mind that this is the same steps that you will use whether it's generically through out QuickBooks or for a Vendor or a Customer. Let's go to the next screen, I'm going to ask to actually do a Letter Template from scratch. On the following screen it now asks me what type of letter do you want. I'm going to simply put Test in for my template. I'll also say that this will be for the customer. When I go to the next screen you will note that it brings me to Microsoft Word. Now please keep in mind, all of the features of Word are now available at this point. For instance if you would prefer to look at this in a Print Layout you can. On my Toolbar you will notice that it allows me to insert my Company Fields or insert the Customer Name Field. When I insert my Company Name it will actually out the name on the top screen as with all documents in Word, I can then just center it. I can now go down a few lines, change my alignment and start inserting my Customer Name. Here's where we can make a decision on whether or not we want to mail this through the US Postal System or if we'd like to email it. If I would like to email it I may choose first to put in my Company Name go down a line and then perhaps I'd like to go ahead and grab an email address. Now I recommend that you read up in Word on how it actually works with these components. This email address will automatically correlate to this Send To Feature that will send each of these as a Mail Recipient Receipt. I have the choice of whether its for review or as an attachment. This particular movie does not go into that detail however keep in mind that it's a wonderful feature for automation. When I'm ready to continue my letter I'll simply just keep it going down a few spaces and now I'll type in whatever text I want to. So I'll just type in some text. I would continue all of my information, at any time I am able to insert a field, if I would like to refer to the customer's first name or last name, right within the text of the letter, I can. If I'm asking them please verify your phone number, I can put the phone number field in. Perhaps you're telling them that you're going to increase your Credit Limit or you want to confirm an open balance on the account. All of these are options that can be added to this letter. When I'm finished I'll simply close out of my Word Document and it wants to know if I'd like to save my changes. I'm going to go ahead and say Yes, you'll notice now that the template has been created and I can use my template. I'm going to unmark our customers and just take a few. I'll go to the next screen, you'll notice our test appears within the template list, go to the next screen again; accept my name and now we're creating the letters. Now you'll notice here that there's some missing information, I'm going to say OK and review the information in my letter. Now you'll note this particular letter is just fine, if I go down you'll see that for preset sample name their company was not typed in. Here's where your going to see that how you work with your data becomes very important, ensuring that you properly fill out all of the fields within QuickBooks is now essential to being able to use the Mail Merge within Word. The nice part is that if I close out of Word and close out of my templates I can simply change my Customer Information and go back into preparing the letters, my template will now be there to reuse.