Overview
This is a cloud application (web portal) designed specifically for VetlinkPRO clients to be able to deliver statements in large numbers to their client base with a number of advantages over standard email delivery. This design will also assist practices to solve other business tasks including delivery of monthly newsletters (HTML or PDF) and promotions, as well as generating hits and visits on their website with the Client Portal option.
Traditionally, financial statements are printed on paper and then posted to clients’ addresses. It is increasingly obvious that sending out statements to clients in this way tends to be very labour intensive as well as slow and an increasingly costly exercise. Postage of a standard DLE envelope is increasing from 60 cents to 70 cents in New Zealand, and there’s no doubt that similar increases will be forthcoming in Australia and most other countries. In real terms, including printing (ink), envelopes and labour, one can easily put a price of at least $1.50 to $2.00 per statement, and even more if one includes a printed Newsletter or Advert! In any case, regardless of cost, many clients are now demanding that statements be sent in an electronic form as they prepare to move to a fully paperless system themselves.
Introduction
VetlinkPRO therefore now supports the bulk emailing of client statement links through a secure web portal for a fraction of the cost of a postage stamp. This new ability to email links to access statements will hopefully become the preferred method of sending statements. CFL has worked in conjunction with P2P Limited who have developed the web portal and web logistics to provide reliable email broadcasting facilities. P2P Limited will also provide historical statements to your clients via the “My Records” facility (
Client Portal).
Why a web portal?
Bulk emailing from a desktop application like VetlinkPRO (or any other such program) within your business will have varied delivery success rates. If large numbers of email are sent simultaneously from a non-registered or non-recognised IP address (your standard internet connection), the chances of delivery are reduced as many spam filters and in fact your own ISP will block them. Note that most ISPs have limits; some restrict the number of emails sent per hour, some by total number in succession, and others have a daily limit. This can cause major issues when dealing with bulk emailing of important documents such as financial statements which need to have a higher guarantee of delivery. In addition to these reasons, your server, internet connection and bandwidth will be severely compromised when sending larger numbers in future; we have decided to build future proof technology today with several other simultaneous benefits.
Client Statement Portal
Monthly statements broadcast to clients are stored on a special cloud portal, and historical financial data is then accessible via a Practice’s website on a 24/7 basis. This is particularly useful when clients need such information after hours when doing their taxes, or when they have lost an old statement. Providing such a service also reduces incoming phone calls for such information and assists in staff productivity within a practice, let alone incurred fax and postage charges. Finally, no client can now say they did not receive their statement to pay their balance – the statement will now always be available online, even if a posted or emailed copy does not reach them!
How does it work?
Once statements are generated through the end of month screen you will now be given more options which will upload statements (only for clients who have requested it) to the web portal ready for you to broadcast. This may take some time depending on the number of pdf files that need to be uploaded so, once finished, the administrator will receive an email letting him/her know when emails are ready to broadcast. You then login to the website, select the newsletter (if you have that option), statement month you wish to send, check the distribution list, and then click to broadcast. This process is detailed above.
Delivery options & Advertising
If one were to be unimaginative, emailing of statements would be as simple as emailing a PDF file to the client. We decided to put our thinking caps on and looked at how we could solve other pending business tasks for the clinic at the same time. To this end, this module has several options as follows:
Primary Options:
- Send a simple email with the clinic logo and a link to the monthly statement that a client can view/print
- Allow design of a fully graphical HTML Monthly Newsletter and send that with a link with the monthly statement
- Same as (1) but allow the attachment of a link to the clinic’s Monthly Newsletter in PDF format
When a client clicks on the link to access their statement, we show them a “Splash Page” with their current details as confirmation. In addition to their client information we also have an image or advert with a web link. This is designed for “seasonal” marketing images. We expect that clinics will want a different image each month and will also want to direct a different image/advert to different client groups. For these reasons, the following options are also available.
Secondary Options (Splash / Landing Page):
- Allows pre-design of 12 months’ worth of advertising material from January to December having different images/adverts
- Each Month then also allows up to 5 different advertising images linked to matching client BATCH codes (1st 3 letter match) so different client groups can be presented with different advertising (eg. Small Animal Clients may see Flea advert while Dairy Clients see adverts relating to their monthly promotion, and so on)
Landing Page Image dimensions: 550(w) * 330 (h) pixels. Image size must be less than 300 KB. Note that it can be jpeg, png or even a GIF file with 2 or 3 changing images but file size has a limit.
* This is an Add-On feature