Default Email Messages

Every invoice you email carries a covering message, and somebody has to write it. Left to itself that means whoever sends the invoice types something — differently each time, in whatever language they happen to think of, with the tone of a Tuesday afternoon.

Write it once here instead. Your invoice email and your three reminder levels each get their own wording, in each language you sell in, and from then on every email arrives pre-filled: the right text, the right language, the invoice number already in it. Nobody retypes anything, and a reminder that has to be firm reads exactly as firm as you decided when you were calm.

You’ll find this under System → Messages (requires the messages permission).

What you’re writing here#

The Message — the text of the email itself — and, for invoices and reminders, an optional Subject. Leave the subject empty and neoo composes it from the document (Invoice 10042, Reminder 1 — 10042); it stays editable each time you send.

These are defaults, not rules. They’re what a customer gets when nothing more specific applies, and everything downstream can still override them — see which message a customer actually gets below.

The message types#

The tabs across the top are the emails neoo sends:

Worth noting: this wording is the email, not the reminder letter attached to it. The letter itself — the dunning text your customer reads on the PDF — is edited in Invoice Layout & Wording. The two are separate on purpose, so the covering email can stay short while the attached document does the formal work.

One message per language#

Pick a Language, write the message, pick the next one. Each of the five languages neoo issues documents in — Deutsch (Schweiz), Deutsch (Deutschland), English, Français, Italiano — holds its own text for the selected type. The language carrying the Dataset default badge is the one set as Default language under Defaults → Settings, and it’s the one that catches everything else.

You don’t have to fill in all five. A language you leave empty simply falls through to your default language, which is usually what you want: write German and English, leave Italian blank, and your Italian-speaking customers get the German text rather than an empty email. Fill Italian in the day you’d rather they didn’t.

Save stores every language of the message type you’re currently on, so you can work through all five and save once. But switching to another tab reloads that type from scratch — so save before you leave a tab, or the wording you just wrote is gone without a warning. Switching language within a tab is safe; switching type is not.

Which message a customer actually gets#

This is the part worth understanding, because it answers the question that eventually comes up: why did this customer get that text?

When an email is about to go out, neoo works down this list and takes the first thing it finds:

1. Whatever is in the send window. The message is pre-filled for you, but if anyone edits it before sending, that edit is what goes out — for that one email only. Nothing here is changed. The edit only counts if it leaves some text, though: clear the message entirely and the defaults below take over again, so deleting the pre-filled text won’t send a blank covering message.
2. The customer’s own message, from their Communication tab. A customer with their own wording for this message type always gets it, regardless of language — they have one message per type, in whatever language you wrote it in. The optional subject on that tab works the same way.
3. Your default for that customer’s language. The customer’s Language, from the same tab, decides which of your five texts is used.
4. Your default for the dataset’s default language. The safety net when you haven’t written that customer’s language yet.
5. Nothing. If none of the above has any text, the email goes out with an empty body. That’s the honest signal that this message type was never set up.

So the two things to check when a customer gets unexpected wording are, in order: does that customer have their own message? (theirs beats yours, always) and what language is on their record? — because a customer set to Français gets your French text, not the one you were looking at when you wrote it. Customer-specific messages often start in the send window itself: when someone edits the message before sending, neoo offers Save default, and one click stores that text as the customer’s own message from then on.

Vendors work exactly the same way. Their Communication tab overrides these defaults for that vendor, and the same fallback applies.

The quickest way to see what a customer will actually receive is to open the send window on one of their invoices. The message shown there is the resolved result of the whole chain — not a template, but the text that will be sent.

Variables#

Type { anywhere in the message — or in the subject — and pick from the list to drop in a value that fills itself at send time: the invoice number, the due date, the total, the contact’s name, your IBAN. Every message type offers the same set.

The variables and what each one inserts are listed in full under Using variables in messages.

This is not the Email tab#

Two settings, similar names, entirely different jobs — and it’s worth being clear which you want:

• System → Messages — this page. What the email says.
• System → Defaults → Email — how the email leaves: your mail server, the address it’s sent from. Covered in Defaults.

If your customers are getting the wrong wording, you want this page. If they’re getting nothing at all, start with the Email tab.