Using Contact Plans For Batch Letters

This document steps through scheduling Debtor letters using a contact plan. This requires familiarity with creating reports and letters and contact plans in Collect!

Up to now, you may have been scheduling letters one at a time by going to an account and creating a contact. When you are comfortable with this process, you are ready to automate it using a contact plan.

1. Create a letter template for each of the letters you want to send. If you are already sending letters manually, you may want to select the same letters for your contact plan.

Please try out the sample letters in the Demonstration database. Finding one that is close to what you need will shorten the time needed to have your templates ready.

2. Create a Contact Plan for each letter.

You may be able to use one of the existing contact plans in the Demonstration database, as is or with only a few small modifications. Use the L1 Contact Plan in the Demonstration database as an example.

Letters may be scheduled based on criteria you set in the Contact Plan, using a 'Schedule if' condition. For example, you might want to schedule the letter only if the Debtor's Owing is greater than zero. (de.ow > 0 is the 'Schedule if' condition for the contact plan Letter event.) Please refer to How To Design New Contact Plans for a complete tutorial.

3. When you are on the Debtor form, use the Action field to type in the Code of the Contact Plan you want to run, or select the ACTION button to choose from the list of contact plans. As the plan runs, it will create a letter event in the debtor's contact schedule. On the appropriate day, the letter will be printed in the daily letter batch.

4. To run the Contact Plan on a number of accounts, select Browse from the top menu bar and then select Active Debtors from the drop-down choices. Press F6 to bring up the Edit Search Criteria form where you may enter criteria to use to select the accounts. Or, tag the accounts directly from the list of debtors.

5. Use the Tools, Batch Processes command to run your contact plan on the tagged list. This will schedule letters for each account in the list.

6. When you first create a Debtor, you typically apply a NEW or NSF Contact plan to the Debtor. This will automatically schedule the first notice and a review in a number of days.

7. To print the letters on the appropriate day, after they have been scheduled, run your Scheduled Batch Letters.

See Also

- Report Writer Topics
- How To Use Contact Plans
- Scheduled Batch Letters