Get the Ultimate Netsuite Invoice Template for Customer Service

Netsuite invoice template for Customer Service

in this lesson i'm going to show you how you can make email templates which is generally the next step after advanced pdfs but you have to do some differences here because there are different styling techniques you need to do to make them look right so if you've already made an advanced pdf and you tried to use it as your email template as well you may have gotten something that looked a little bit like this so this is inside of my email in outlook and you can see that there's a lot of differences that are way off first of all why is there this footer this is a footer piece of information that's showing up in the header and you can see that this this would have been like page one of two or something like that and that's showing up up here too and it's super wide and spread out and even this little button right here this was a lot bigger before it was spread out probably about to here with a lot more margins so it looks way different and it kind of looks almost like junk mail you don't want that to happen at all for your customers so i'm going to show you how you can make actual email templates that look good you know they're not going to be quite the same as an advanced pdfs because there's a lot of limitations with email templates and this is just across the board everybody has a hard time making them you might not get to the point where they're as good looking as some of your advanced pdfs but they'll be pretty close the first step is pretty similar to advanced pdfs we're going to follow a lot of the same processes actually first of all i'm going to go into customization and then i'm going to go to forms and advanced pdf html templates and then from here we're going to do a pretty similar process that we did before so i'm going to search for invoice and we looked for the one that said customize next to it right here and i'm going to say customize [Music] now we're in here i'm gonna rename this one as well to our tutorial invoice and i'm gonna say email template perfect and i'm actually going to go back i'm going to control backspace because we already did the one for [Music] the advanced pdf and i'm really going to have a quite a few of the same things in there we're mainly just changing styling so i'm going to look for the one we did for that which i believe was this tutorial one i'm going to click edit because i just want to grab the code for it and then from there i can just copy some other stuff so i'm going to select this code source select yes and i'm going to go ctrl a and ctrl c which takes all of that and copies it and this new one that we just created and let me refresh this ah here we go tutorial invoice email template i'm going to do the source code for that one and i'm just going to copy and paste over top of all of that now we did just get all that stuff into here now i'm gonna save it to get the preview i do have to just go back into this to invoice because it takes you back out to the main menu which is fine so we're looking for the email template so tutorial invoice email template i'm going to look at this preview button if you recall from our advanced pdf lesson this is exactly what that preview information looked like before and you can confirm that by going back into that other one we created this is the the one from the advanced pdf i'm just going to click preview on that one and you can just confirm that they're exactly the same carbon copy and now we're just confirming that they look exactly the same the advanced pdf should be the really the base for the email template if you've already completed it there's no reason to rework all of that although there's gonna be some rework here in the styling and it is kind of a pain but kind of a necessary evil right so we're gonna we're just gonna click out of it that advanced pdf information because now we don't really need it we already copied it over into a new template and you can see that template we've got here this tutorial invoice email template now that we have all the code in place assuming that the advanced pdf is exactly how you wanted it before i'm going to go ahead and save this and we need to attach it onto your transaction form so that it emails the right copy to make sure that it emails the right copy we're going to go customization forms transaction forms and you'll remember that we've been in this before when we're working on the advanced pdfs so i'm going to go to the transaction form that we were working on it was this tutorial invoice transaction form and i'm going to click edit and you can see that there's a print template and then there's an email template so whenever you print it's going to use this file and whenever you email it's going to use this file but because they're going to have different styling measures in place we need to make sure that we select the right one for email template we just created one so let's go find that right now tutorial invoice email template is the one we created so you can see that there's actually two different ones being selected whenever printing is happening it uses this template and whenever an email is happening it uses this template this is for when it's going to be applied to an invoice specifically i'm going to save this so tutorial invoice transaction form probably going to want to select this as the preferred method and it's going to just toggle it from that other one before and i'm going to click submit so now i'm going to go into an actual invoice and i'm going to select this first one because i've been doing some editing in it already and click edit and you're going to want to use an invoice that's probably going to be a sample invoice and and the reason why is so that you can do some testing and email it to your own email now we're in the invoice right now and i'm going to go into communication and this email right here is what the email template is going to email to so go ahead and go make sure that whatever your test email is that you're sending it over to ensure that the information is transferring it has that email right here and i like to have a sample invoice in the first place anyways but try and get as much content on that invoice as possible so that you can have pretty accurate information displaying even in your samples and then from there i'm going to go look at customize form and this will just ensure that we've using that transaction form that we just created so we're inside the customized form and oh shoot now we've got this tutorial version i picked the wrong one as my preferred method but that's not really a big deal because you can customize each one of these specifically so when i was in the transaction form area that was actually created originally when i first put this data right here so i'm just going to manually change it from right here versus going into that transaction form i'm going to go to the email template and change this to the tutorial email template and now we've got the right ones working i'm going to click save and this is the actual one that is being used even though it's not the preferred method it's the actual one being used within invoice and that is just because we've already customized that form specifically so how do i get this to actually test the email template well we're going to go into the invoice and i'm going to show you how to send that email template first of all if you remember from the previous one you can print it via this print button and it uses whatever one you selected for the print template and then that real information from that invoice would show up here or i can go ahead and click actions and then email and then we'll just give it a second it'll show up in my inbox so here we have it inside of my actual inbox and you can see that it looks very very different than what we thought it would look like so we have to go back into the template and edit it so it's very very different in this video i'm not going to go into the high technical parts of it but i'm going to give at least somebody some technical advice on how to format this to make it look right without having to do too much trial and error and i'll just go over those steps right now but if you're not a technical person and that doesn't really interest you anyways and you just realize okay i need to hand this off to someone else not a big deal you can kind of stop the video at this point but at least you know how to apply an email template and some of the process that goes along with it now we're going to go back into that invoice email template to do some editing into it directly so i'm going to search for it here and i see that we've got it right here i'm going to click edit and now we're going to get into some of the coding aspects of things we've already got our source code on usually i like to be editing this in something like vs code it's just a little different and i'm going to be following some guidelines i actually already posted from a blog post i had which was right here advanced pdf to email template how to make an email template and this is going to be something i reference quite a bit because it's got a nice little tips and tricks specifically for netsuite email templates on how to format them and code them correctly because some things that you do in advanced pdf no longer work anymore and you know it's it's just kind of an important step to do you can bypass this email template just by attaching the advanced pdf to an email but that's going to add a lot of steps if you have a lot of customers that you're sending invoices to if you just have like a handful a month to do that's probably the route i'd suggest going in the beginning but here are some of the coding techniques that we're going to go over so that's optimized for outlook or gmail inside of here there's a few things that we can no longer do anymore and it's using these macros this macro list are essentially variables that you can store your footer information up at the top and that's why in that first example i showed you the footer information was showing at the top because it took the html in order and saw that macro at the top and couldn't read that as a macro so normally this macro right here is called out at the bottom we're going to scroll down here and you can see that we actually caught it out in this body right here so that's one of the things that you can no longer do another thing is a lot of the styling techniques are going to be different so normally you're used to using these classes but these can basically be no longer used as effectively anymore so i suggest actually using inline styling and if you're not familiar with that if you're not someone technical what this is doing is calling out let's say this was class and said class equals hr it would call out all this styling information for this table but instead you're going to be styling that like this where it says style equal margin top 10 px with 100 that's what inline styling is if you're not familiar with it another thing that you're going to need to do is remember that you'll probably realize it's really quick that margin top and margin bottom and all that margin stuff doesn't really work anymore you're going to have to hack it a little bit and that's one reason why i suggest doing things like this right here it's essentially manually putting in a space instead of using margin left or margin right around this pay here button which is like this i used spaces so letter spaces three spaces to the left and three spaces to the right otherwise this would have been this border would have been right up next to the p but let's say that you wanted to do margin top you'd have to add a row above it and add a bunch of spaces it's a bit of a hack but it actually works when you're dealing with that you just kind of have to work with some of your limitations another thing is i like to sign the total width of your entire main document to with the 600px and this is one that i've just found to work a lot across across all devices in general the next step is to do align the parent tables to the center what i mean by that is when you're working with these tables i like to put tables within tables sometimes so center align the parent table and let's me look at this document one more time and what that'll do is it'll put that whole table the parent table right in the center so that any device that reads it it shows up right in the center and that works great for mobile too another thing to consider is to using a single font that works across everything sans serif works pretty well but you'll have to look to see what's compatible it might not be your company font but you can at least find something that is compatible using tables is highly effective when you're doing email templates if you're not familiar with tables they're really not that hard think of an excel table where you've got you define a table with rows and columns and maybe a header piece of information that describes what is in each column or in each row that's really what i decide to go after is inline styling lots of tables and knowing that you can have to use little hacks getting around the margin top and margin bottom and i list a lot of them in that blog post so you may have to just reference some of that information to get some examples for the code i hope that brief demo helps you understand what email templates are and how they're a lot different from advanced pdfs it simply comes down to the fact that different types of email software's like outlook and gmail read data differently and all different types of styling and it's a pain for companies to have to deal with because you think it'd be easier but it's just not it's not as easy as you think i highly recommend if this is too technical for you to hire a developer to do that and there's lots of places to do that too pretty much every netsuite developer has worked with advanced pdfs and email templates but you probably will be able to find someone pretty easy enough i like to think that it's probably the easiest skill set out of all the netsuite development because it's just simply html and some css some styling techniques along with some things that are more unique to netsuite advanced pdfs like free marker but that's pretty simple actually people can look up the documentation on three marker pretty easily hopefully that helps if you got any more questions make sure to comment below