Hey there, I have a clunky process that I’d love to get thoughts on how best to improve: Shipment confirmation emails for some of our order types.
I’ve always been confused by Acumatica’s out-of-the-box “Email Shipment” Action on the Process Shipments screen. There are some major defects to it:
- When rows are processed, they don’t drop off the queue. So you cannot schedule this screen, at the risk that the same email could be sent more than once (which is a bad customer experience).
- Rows drop off this screen once the shipments get invoiced. So if they get invoiced prior to getting emailed, we’ve lost our window to email those out.
- Can the email template associated with this process action capture all the necessary fields that we want to include in our email? Tracking numbers, tracking URLs, etc. I honestly don’t know.
So I guess Business Events come to the rescue...except:
- They are notoriously frustrating to get working properly. They may just choose not to work and you don’t know why, lol.
- Depending upon how a shipment is confirmed (via shipping software or manually) tracking numbers and tracking URLs can show up in a few different tables/fields. And since you cannot Group by anything with BE inquiries, it is a hassle to setup multiple events to account for all of these scenarios.
- When an email does get sent properly it doesn’t show up in the Activities section of the shipment — or at least I don’t know how to accomplish that.
- If you need to resend an email confirmation, there’s no easy way (that I know of) to do that.
- So it’s difficult to have visibility into all the emails that need to go out, and which ones actually did and didn’t.
Does anyone have any creative ideas? We’d rather not pay an arm and a leg to our VAR to solve for something that Acumatica should solve for out-of-the-box.
Would it be cleaner to use “Trigger by Schedule” BEs rather than “Trigger by Record Change”?
Is it easy-ish to customize the Process Shipments screen to fix the defects I mentioned above?
Thanks for any ideas.