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Options ✉️
When setting up Aspire to allow your company to send invoices to its customers, there are multiple ways to do this. Setting up according to best practices will help ensure that your invoices are properly received by your customers.
The following options are available, but the first option is highly recommended as the best practice.
All invoices sent by your Aspire system are sent through a created Aspire contact (i.e. “Accounting Department”) that goes through a generic email address set up for that purpose (i.e. “ar@company_name.com”) and are sent through your company’s email service (Outlook or Gmail).
This option provides maximum consistency across all of your customers. Since emails go out through your company’s email provider, it is straight forward to ensure that your customers add you to their email whitelist so that your email invoices will not be blocked by their spam filters. This is the approach for which instructions are provided in this article.
Option 2: Set the Property Account Owner as the From contact on your Invoices.
Invoices sent by your Aspire system are sent from your account manager responsible for the account. Since this option provides for invoices to be sent out from different people within your organization, you will have to ensure that mail is set up and functioning properly for each account manager. This requires more work than validating a single user in your Aspire system for sending out invoices. As with the first approach – assuming all account managers are set up properly in Aspire – emails go out through your company’s email provider. This makes it straight forward to ensure that your customers add you to their email white-list so that your email invoices will not be blocked by their spam filters.
Option 3 (NOT RECOMMENDED): Using the third approach sends emails out through Aspire’s mail service rather than through your own. This makes it more difficult to ensure that your customer’s white list will prevent invoices from being blocked as SPAM. This is a deprecated feature and the capability will be removed from Aspire in an upcoming release.
The remainder of this article explains how to set up Aspire properly to allow it to email invoices.
Option 1: Set a generic Accounting contact as the From contact on your invoices
To follow best practice (option #1), you will first create a generic contact and sync their email to send out invoices to your clients and to receive responses.
Steps
Outside of Aspire, create an email account in your email service. (To find the available syncing integrations, click here.)
In Aspire, go to the Contacts screen by clicking the Contacts icon and then click the blue New Contact button.
Then
Enter:
First Name as ‘Accounting’.
Last Name as ‘Department’.
Email Address field as the company email address you set up to use for emails.
Contact Type as Employee
Click the three dot menu in the upper right while on the contact record and click Create User.
If the contact already has a user tied to it, the option will say Update User.
The User Details screen will appear with some of the information from the contact record shown, such as the Contact's Name.
Enter in a PIN and password for this user. As well, assign the System Admin role to the contact.
Click Save. You will be taken back to the Contact record with the PIN information filled in.
Click Save again on the contact's record. You will then be taken to the Contacts Search screen.
You will now need to login in as the contact and user you have just created to sync the generic email address with Aspire.
📌 Note: Device approval will not be needed if you are logging in through an already approved device.
Click Settings in the bottom left hand corner. Click the Log Out button that appears.
Login with the PIN or the Email and Password you setup for the contact.
You will enter the Aspire system. Click your Profile Icon in the bottom left corner. Click User Settings.
Under the Sync section, check the box called Sync Email. Select an email provider and fill out the needed information. Check out this article for further information on syncing your email.
Click Save.
Now it's time to set your created synced user as the From contact for your invoices!
📌 Note: If you are setting up the emails to come from a specific employee in your organization rather than from a generic contact, you must ensure that person’s sync is set up under their user settings.
Setting a System-Wide Invoice Email From Contact
Steps
While in the Administration screen, click on Configuration at the top right and then go to the Invoicing subsection.
Under Invoice Email From, click the second radio-button and then select the name of the contact you just set up. All invoices will be sent from this contact’s email account.
Add a subject line with Email Tokens (🔍) that will be used for all invoices. As well, add information and tokens, including the account's signature, to your Invoicing email in the Invoice Email Body section.
Once finished, click Save to save your changes.
📌 Note: Make sure to test a few invoices after this setup, and call the customer to be sure they received the emailed invoices. Have them note where the emails were sent from.
Option 2: Set the Property Account Owner as the From contact on your Invoices
You may also choose to have emails sent from all of the account managers. If you choose to set your system up using this approach, all account managers must be set up to sync with their email service.
Keep in mind that this makes troubleshooting invoice emailing issues a little more complex. Once all accounts are set up properly, skip directly to the Setting a System-Wide Invoice From Contact section.
Instead of selecting the second radio button, select the first radio button of Property Account Owner.
The invoice emails will be sent from the email of the account manager associated with the property.
📌 Note: Make sure to test a few invoices after this setup, and call the customer to be sure they received the emailed invoices. Have them note where the emails were sent from.
Option 3
Aspire recommends you avoid this approach. Aspire plans to remove this capability in a future release.