Choose what notifications to send your customers or vendors

NetSuite has the wonderful ability to send emails for almost every transaction.

Opportunity, Quote, Sales Order, Item Fulfillment, Invoice, Credit Memo and Return Authorization just to name a few.

This preference is enabled when the Email Transactions checkbox is checked in the Preferences subtab of the customer or vendor record. (Location may change if working with a custom form; check with your administrator to locate the field).

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Sending Specific Transactions Emails to Your Customer or Vendor

When enabled, NetSuite will send an email to the primary email saved in the customer or vendor record.

Sometimes, a company may want to email specific transactions only. For example, a company may want to send only sales order acknowledgment, shipment confirmations, and notification of paid invoice or cash sale transactions.

To perform this customization, we need the following:

Disable the global preference “Customers Default to Email Transactions”.

Navigate to Setup > Company > Email Preferences.

Uncheck the “Send Transactions via Email” for all customer and vendor records.

May also use the Mass Update tool to uncheck this preference in bulk.

Create a workflow to send the emails. A workflow is a customization tool in NetSuite to assist in automating actions in a process; we have another blog providing more explanation on a workflow.

Here are the basic steps to create the workflow.

a. Navigate to Customization > Workflow > Workflows > New

b. Populate the following:

1. Name: This will be the name of your workflow, you can name it something like “Email Sales Order Acknowledgement”.

2. ID: This is NetSuite’s internal identification of this specific workflow; best practice is to add your (creators) initials to identify your customization.

3. Record Type: select Transaction.

4. SubTypes: select Sales Order.

5. Description: Add information on what your workflow will accomplish.

6. Release Status: select Testing for now, we will set it to Release once your workflow has emailed the transaction successfully.

7. Keep Instance and History: Best Practice is to set this to Always.

8. Enable Logging: Best Practice is to check this box.

Workflow logs will appear in the system information section of the record type you are creating the workflow for. These workflow logs will provide information on why a workflow action did not execute. Very handy when troubleshooting your workflows.

1. Initiation: select “Event Based”

2. Event Definition: select “On Create”

3. Click Save.

c. Create an action in your workflow

Navigate to State > New Action

2. Select the “Send Email” action

3. Scroll down to the Parameters sections of the page and select a Sender

You can select a specific employee from the sender list, or from a specific NetSuite record field. For example, you can select the creator of the sales order or the sales rep saved on the sales order transaction.

4. Select a Recipient of the email

You can select a specific email saved on the sales order transaction or in the customer record.

*Additional Customization Free Tip: Create a custom email field in the customer record and name that field a specific role for that customer record (i.e. Buyer, Accounts Receivable). This will provide you with options to save more emails for the customer record than just using the primary email field.

5. Select a custom email template (created beforehand) or select the Custom Content button to personalize the email Subject and Body in the workflow.

6. Save. the action

When the workflow is saved, create a test sales order. After saving the sales order, verify receipt of email.

This workflow can be applied against other transaction subtypes in the workflow definition page. Each workflow can be customized with different subjects, messages and field data can be sourced from the specific transaction.

Written by: Brianne Yeomans, Senior Business Consultant

NetSuite Blog