Define Document Layouts for Customers and Vendors

Document layouts use report layouts to define the look and feel of documents that you send to customers and vendors. Business Central provides standard layouts, but you can also tailor custom layouts for each of your business partners. For more information, see Create and Modify Custom Report Layouts. You select standard and custom document layouts from customer and vendor cards by choosing the Document Layouts action. The value in the Usage field defines the process for which the document layout is used. For example, for customers, you might use Reminder, Shipment, and Confirmation types of document layouts.

Document layouts can also save you time when you send documents to customer or vendor contacts by email. For each layout that you assign to the customer or contact, you can by specify one or more contact email addresses. For example, you can send an invoice to the customer's purchasing and warehouse contacts. Adding contact email addresses is easy. On the Document Layouts page, the Select Email from Contacts action let's you choose from a list of the contact email addresses that you've registered for the customer or vendor. You can also add email addresses manually. If you enter multiple addresses, separate them with a semi-colon, and don't add spaces between the addresses.

Before you can define which document layout to use for which processes, and which contact to send the document to, you must load all the available reports (documents) from the Report Selections page. You can quickly load the documents by using the Copy from Report Selection action on the Document Layouts page.

The steps in the following sections describe how to define sales document layouts from the Customer Card page. For vendors, the steps are the same from the Vendor Card page.

To load the standard document layouts for sales documents for a customer

1. Choose the icon, enter Customers, and then choose the related link.
2. Open the Customer Card page for the customer, and then choose the Document Layouts action.
3. On the Document Layouts page, choose the Copy from Report Selection action.

The Document Layouts page displays all layouts that are available for sales documents.

To select a custom report layout to use for the sales document layout

If you haven't already created a custom report layout for the type of document, you'll need to do that first. For more information, see Create and Modify Custom Report Layouts.

1. Choose the icon, enter Customers, and then choose the related link.
2. Open the Customer Card page for the customer, and then choose the Document Layouts action.
3. On the Document Layouts page, on the line for a report layout that you want to use a custom layout for, choose the Custom Layout Description field.
4. On the Custom Report Layouts page, select the document layout that you want to use for the type of sales document. For more information, see Create and Modify Custom Report Layouts.

To specify which contact will receive which document layout for a customer

To save time when you send documents to customer and vendor contacts by email, specify their email addresses on document layouts. For example, you can always send customer statements to their accountant contacts and sales orders to their purchasers, or purchase orders to vendor salespeople.

1. On the Document Layouts page, on the line for a report layout that you want to send to a specific contact for the customer, choose the Select Email from Contacts action.
2. On the Contacts page, select one or more contacts, and then choose OK.

See Also

Update Custom Report Layouts
Create and Modify Custom Report Layouts
Import and Export a Custom Report or Document Layout
Send Documents by Email
Managing Report Layouts
Work with Reports, Batch Jobs, and XMLports

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