Letter Service Module

Letter Service companies are mailing house organizations geared to high volume document management. They have the equipment to output mass mailings from an electronic file of variable data, imbedding the same in preset templates that you provide them with. They are a time and money saver if your internal processes have reached pinnacles with your own document handling equipment such that you have full time employees dedicated to printing letters and stuffing envelopes all day.

Collect!'s Letter Service feature is integrated to give you the option of either printing inhouse OR sending an electronic file out for letter service processing. Utilizing letter service for your large batches does not need to interfere with those one-off letters that need to be ad hoc generated and printed internally.

If you enter into a contract with a letter service company, the next steps to launching your use of this feature is to provide your chosen vendor with sample output of your letters that you will be generating so that they may set them up on their side. Each letter type your submit to them for setup must have a unique letter code of up to 4 numeric digits, which will in turn be what each letter will be called in the electronic file you send them. So that they can configure your letters properly, the samples you provide them should be test letters which have all the field inserts populated with representative data that will mimic what a live letter is supposed to look like.

Typically, you can create a test debtor in your live or demo database and use your existing letter(s) to create this test output for your vendor. There are 2 industry standards for electronic letter service file output: Ontario format and non-Ontario format. Ask your vendor which of the two types they require your electronic file to be written in as this setting will be configured into your feature setup screens.

Setup

See the Help topic How To Use Letter Service.

File Format

For technical information about the file format, see the Help topics:

How To Setup Letter Service File Format - Ontario Format,

How To Setup Letter Service File Format - Not Ontario Format

Providers

If your vendor inquires as to what software you are using to output your file, it is Collect! by Comtech Systems Inc.

The following vendors are some established letter service companies with whom our product and our end users have successfully interfaced:

Click here for a list.

The Letter Service Module is an add-on functionality. Contact Administration at 250-391-0466 option 3 for pricing options.

See Also

- Letter Service Topics
- NCOA Topics