Spring 2009 news from Courier Systems

Nigel Thomas and Frances Valdes complete the 2009 London Marathon

Well they did it again. This time Nigel didn't have a cold (see) but Frances did have a broken bone in her foot! It had caused her problems for sometime. If you add Nigel and Frances's trip to Thailand and Vietnam in March; they weren't exactly well trained! Deciding to do the Marathon was a last minute thing. It was do it or loose the place. So they trained all day Easter Monday. To be precise, it was really all afternoon, as they got up late.
It took Nigel and Frances 7 hours to walk the 26.2 miles. In fact, they were very close to being the last to finish, which means they were almost the last people ever to complete the Flora London Marathon. Next year the Marathon will be organised by Virgin.
Nigel and Frances had such a great day, they intend to walk it next year too. However, next year they will be doing it for charity - you have been warned!

Alternative Email2SMS providers (update)

We have now enhanced the Email2SMS feature of Controller to work with the following providers:

VGSMail ( Original and still the recommended provider - www.vgsmail.com )
ESENDEX ( a professional outfit but quite expensive for low volume www.esendex.com )
BULKSMS ( a cheap alternative when all else fails - www.bulksms.co.uk )

Improvements to Email system

A number of users have requested that Controller be able to a send single email to multiple email addresses. If you have more than one email address on an account (to be used for job notification - POB, POD and so on) you can now send the same email to multiple addresses (maximum of 4)
Please check your emails are working as expected and let us have feedback if you experience problems...

Diagnostic reporting

Diagnostic reporting feature added which allows us to help you resolve issues quicker. Normally turned off and only to be turned on at our request (System>Configuration>System Settings>System>Diagnostic Reporting Level)

Printing of Invoices/Credit notes if emailing

When you configure an account to receive Invoices and Credit Notes by email, you can also suppress the printing of Invoices and Credit Notes. However, this may cause issues if you want to produce printed copies for your records.

If an account has the 'If Emailing, do not print' setting checked, Controller will now detect this and prompt you at Invoice print time as to whether you want to print the invoice or not.

Editing accounts

The editing of customer accounts has been improved. There are now more fields you can change from within Controller rather than visiting the back office system

Company logo on Invoices/Credit Notes/Job Dockets

If you use Controller to email any of the above documents, please check the options on the graphics images in the layout designer - you may find that your logo is not being included when emailing

If you include scanned images of your company logo on printed or email documents, please check the images are appearing as expected. Use the layout designer (System>Configuration>Layout Designer) to check the settings. Right-click on the image to set the print/don't print options
Ideally, test print and email some invoices/credit notes/job dockets to yourself to check.

Account export

You can now export customer details from Controller. See Customers && Invoicing>Edit/Add Customers>Export (at the bottom). It should be self explanatory, you can create an export template and save it for future use

Emailing of Consignment note / Job tickets

Emailing of Consignment notes or job tickets has been enabled. Each supplier (driver) can have up to 3 email addresses on their account. The job ticket is compiled into a PDF file and sent as an attachment to the email. If you have drivers with PDA's, you will be able to send the job details as PDA attachments directly to their mobile devices.

Graphic logos added to job ticket

Just like invoices and emails, you can now add BitMap (bmp) graphic files to job dockets