CB Advanced: Innovative Document Templates
Sending personalized letters frequently helps build stronger relationships with clients. That's one of the things that ClientBase does best. A library of customizable documents makes it easy to print personalized letters for your customers. The speed and ease of this feature gives agents reason to be more pro‐active in their communication with customers, thus building customer loyalty. Templates gives you the flexibility to create professional documents for your agency. Create gift certificates, custom newsletters, promotional letters and much more! 1. Go to Global Defaults > General Setup > Document Templates 2. Select File > Load. Select the Template from the drop down box. 3. Make changes to the Template such as adding your agency name, re‐wording the letter, etc. 4. Select Save to overwrite an existing template or Save As to save as a new template name.Customizing Document Templates
1. ClientBase includes a ‘Blank Letter’ Template that includes some Merge Fields. You can make changes to the Blank Letter or select New. 2. Insert Merge fields into your template by first putting your cursor within the template body where the merge field is desired, then clicking on the merge field from the listing to the right. Use Save to overwrite an existing template and Save As to save as a new template name. 3. A formatting toolbar is included that makes formatting your text, inserting links, pictures and tables very easy. Please note this HTML formatting is only included when the template is launched via Merge to Email. All Templates launched through the Merge to Doc Template feature are converted to Plain Text upon converting to MS Word. Note to ClientBase Window Users: Document Templates are shared across ClientBase Online (and ClientBase Browser), and ClientBase Windows and changes made in either are reflected and can be launched in both. Please note one very important difference between Document Templates created/modified in ClientBase Windows and Document Templates created/modified in ClientBase Online (or Browser). The Windows version saves Document Templates as rtf (Rich Text Format), which means the
Creating New Document Templates
text can be formatted with different fonts and color etc. and that graphics can be inserted. Since web applications do not utilize rtf (HTML editing will be coming soon), ClientBase has to open any existing Document Template and convert to txt (Plain Text). Therefore if a Document Template is created or modified in the Windows version and then modified in the Browser version, the Browser version will convert it to plain text (stripping all formatting and graphics) and save it as plain text. To avoid losing formatting features within Document Templates created in the Windows version, we prompt with a warning message before overwriting an rtf Document Template with plain text. If you utilize formatting within your Document Templates then we recommend you make all changes to existing Templates through the Windows version and only add new Templates via the Browser version.
Examples of Templates:
Credit Card Authorization Form
Gift Certificate
Exclusive Invitation
Satisfaction Survey
Newsletter
1. Whether printing a single letter from within a profile, or a large group of letters from the results of a query, ClientBase makes it easy to track mailings to your clients. 2. This icon automatically creates a mailer record for every customer included in the query results. Whether it’s one result or 500 results, a unique mailer record is attached to each profile for historical purposes. 3. The mailers can be viewed from within the client profile by clicking the activities tab, and can also be queried and printed from the Activities Manager by date or subject. 1. Search for the profile(s) to merge with the document. 2. There are a several ways to utilize Merge to Document. a. Select the desired profile and click the Letter icon on the Menu bar. b. From within a client profile, click the Letter icon on the menu bar. 3. When you click the Letter (Merge To Document), a Document Template dialog box appears. 4. Browse for different document templates set up by the database administrator by using the drop‐down menu. After selecting the document template, click OK.
Create a Mailer
Merge to Document
5. Based on the selected template, a letter or a set of letters is merged with information from each client's profile into the Microsoft Word, Wordpad, Open Office, etc. application while you are still in the browser. View the document with all fields merged. From here the document can be edited, if desired, and printed. NOTE: The program you have associated with .doc type files within your Windows settings determines the program used upon clicking Create Word Document. To change the program associated with .doc type files, browse for a .doc file from My Computer, right click on the file and select properties. From the General tab click Change next to Opens with and select from the drop‐down list of choices. If Merge to Document is launched from the results of a search, then one large document is created with page breaks separating the results for each profile included in the search.
You can perform a Merge to Email for a Document Template for one profile or for multiple profiles.
