Mastering the Mail Format for Sending Invoice to Client for Human Resources

Mail format for sending invoice to client for Human Resources

today i'm going to show you how to create a mail merge with email we're going to send a customized invoice to multiple clients simultaneously using outlook in today's video we're going to use an invoice template in microsoft word then we're going to use excel for our data source for all the mail merge fields that are going to go into that template and then we're going to use outlook for our email client be sure and check out my other video on my channel the tutorial for how to create a mail merge document in microsoft word in that video we use an example of an employee benefit statement so you could use the technique that you're going to learn today on how to email mail merge to send a statement like that to all of your employees we're going to use the invoice template today for this video all right here i have an invoice template that i have customized i downloaded an invoice template off of microsoft office templates and have customized it to fit my needs and so this has some core elements of an invoice including the date invoice number and address and also the line items for my invoice it has the subtotal the tax and the total due so what i want to do is create a data source that's going to house all of the data fields that i want to merge into this template for each one of my customers because each one of my customers is going to have different invoice information so i've opened up excel and i started to create a document where each column has a header for each of the mail merge fields that i want to insert into my invoice template so we have a date invoice number the company name the address an id number we have the line one of the invoice for quantity description unit pricing total and then i have more columns built out if you have additional line items that need to go on your invoice keep in mind if you have more than two you'll want to mimic these columns you can copy and insert another set of these columns if you have a third row or a fourth row on your invoice you'll want to label them ingly and insert all of the merge fields appropriately into your invoice so here you can see that i have created my invoice and i have two clients that i'm going to send this to we're going to do this as a test now you could have a hundred rows here of information and this will email merge and send to those 100 clients each of them getting a customized email with the with their own personalized invoice template and what we do here is i've created the subtotal tax and total due fields with the appropriate formulas to calculate my invoice now the key thing for an email mail merge to work is to have a column in your data source for the email address to your client and i want to stress that you want to make sure that that email address is accurate and that the data in your spreadsheet is also accurate because once you hit the button to send the email merge it's going to go to that email address and so you want to make sure that it's 100 accurate so i encourage folks to test this out if you're building it the template um as your first time around make sure to build it and test it out first so that you know that it works appropriately all right so we have our data source and we have this saved on our computer as an excel spreadsheet so what we want to do is come back to our invoice template here and what we're going to do is actually go up to the mailings tab and we're going to select the step-by-step mail merge wizard and i always use the step-by-step mail merge wizard because i find it most helpful or i can go back to different stud steps and stages in the process and make corrections or fixes or whatever i need to do so the mail merge wizard opens up a panel on the right-hand side that you're able to navigate through the first thing we're going to do is select email messages as the type of document type that we're going to create with our mail merge then we're going to say click next at the bottom and we're going to use the current document it'll ask us this if we haven't created the document yet if we have a different document we want to use we can select it but we're going to use the current template document that i have brought up right here then i'm going to go to the next step which is select the recipients and here is where i'm going to select i can click the button to select a different list if you're setting this up for the first time you'll click this button and then you'll search for the spreadsheet that we created um on your hard drive and you'll select that as your data source and it'll show up like this that means that the first tab the first tab of that spreadsheet is the tab that you want to use for your mail merge fields and then you'll click ok and then it shows up the mail merge recipients list here is where you could uncheck or check boxes depending on if there were certain clients in your database and your data source list that you didn't want to send an invoice to you could uncheck that row and it won't create a page or an invoice or an email for that client we're going to leave both of these checked because we want to send both of them as a test and then i'll click ok so then we have the data source that's linked on the back end to your invoice template and so the next thing we want to do is write our email message and here is the section of the mail merge wizard where we want to insert those merge fields to save time i've done it in advance as you can see but i'm going to show you how you would do this you would place your cursor where you want to insert the the merge field so for date i would simply place my cursor click on more items and you'll notice that this list comes up with the merge fields these are all of the column headers in our excel spreadsheet and so we're going to select date to go where we have our cursor and click insert and close and notice that it insert the date there for me i already had it there so i'm going to delete it but you'll it's that easy you simply place your cursor where you want to insert that merge field click the more items list those column headers will come up you'll select which item you want and you'll click insert and then close and it will insert that merge field for you so again to save time i've gone ahead and done that for each area of my invoice where i want to insert that particular merge field so i've insert inserted the merge fields for quantity description unit price line one and then the quantity description unit price in total for line two and our subtotal tax and total due now if you remember from the original video that i did on how to do mail merge you saw that when there is a currency format in excel it doesn't necessarily always come over into your word document as a mail merge as a currency format so you want to make sure that it displays correctly when you do the mail merge so the tip to do that would be um come to the to the mail merge field that you want to make sure is in a currency format you're going to select it by clicking on it then you're going to right click and say toggle field codes and then here you'll notice what i've done i've added this little bit of code here it's a slash with a hashtag and then it's a dollar sign 0.00 i'll paste this in the description below the video so that you can copy and paste this so that you can do the same thing and this will ensure that the formatting of that mail merge field is in a dollar or currency format all right i've done that for each mail merge field that i want to appear as a currency format and so be sure and do that for yours as well if you want them to to be formatted correctly all right the next i'm going to click on the next step of the wizard which is to preview my email and you we can see that the first invoice has been created for client number one and the total due is 508.25 and then if i go up here under the pre i can preview all of the different emails that are going to go to my clients so right now this recipient one if i advance forward to recipient two this is going to go to client two and all of the data from that second row of the data source is populating into the invoice for this client so this client's total amount due is 428 so you can um go through uh several of these to test and make sure that it that all the merge fields look correct on your document just be very careful and detail oriented to make sure that it's accurate and correct and then once it looks good to you you can say complete the merge and this brings us to the last step of the email mail merge where we click on electronic mail this brings up the merge to email window where we can select we want to use email and we can put any subject we want to so i put in invoice test but you could put your monthly invoice whatever you want your subject line of your email to be we want the email format to be in html and we want to send all of them we checked all of the boxes in our data source to include so we want to send them all and then we click ok and so then this will actually email to each one of those clients their individualized invoice so if we go and check our our email we noticed that we got our invoice test and here it is in our email and so we want to check the other one to make sure that that one also went through and we'll check our other email here and we also got it on our other email as well so this is a great way that you can use the mail merge functionality in microsoft office to send an email a customized email to multiple recipients simultaneously very easily and quickly if you found this video helpful be sure and give it a thumbs up to like it and subscribe to my channel you can click the bell to receive a notification every time i post a new video be sure and visit my website at sharonsmithhr.com and if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them in the comment section below the video thanks so much for watching and i will see you next time bye bye