Publish Customer Documents

Publish Customer Documents

Smart Contractor can automatically generate documents with information about your customer's job, and then it can "publish" those documents by either sending them to your customer by email, or by uploading them to your website where your customer can access them.

Examples of customer documents include:

Allowance Schedule
Allowance Cost Variances
Draw Schedule
Job Schedule
Change Orders
Invoices (Payment Applications)
Job Progress
Job Recap
Job Site Photos

You specify which documents to publish to your customer by selecting them in the prompt for Documents To Publish in the Edit Job form

You use the Utilities > Publish Customer Documents menu option to publish customer documents for one or more jobs.

The Publish Customer Documents form prompts you to publish the documents either To Website, or By Email.

If you select the option to publish By Email, Smart Contractor will send an email to the customer with all of the documents selected to publish attached.

If you select the option to publish To Website, the program will create web pages for your customer(s) under your website, and upload the documents there.

When Smart Contractor puts customer documents on your web site, separate web pages (one for each customer) are created under your company's web site. Customers access their web page by entering www.companywebsite.com/customerlogin (where "companywebsite" is your website name) into their browser address prompt.

This will bring up a page that prompts for their Customer Name and Password. They will enter the name and password that you enter in the Customer Name, and Web Access Password prompts in the Edit Customer form.

When they enter these and click Login, they will be taken to the web page for their job.

To be able to put customer job information on your web site, you must meet the following requirements:

You have a web site.
Your web site host provides you with FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access to your web site folder.
Your FTP login account has read/write/delete access to the web site folder.

This is typical of a situation where you (or your web site developer) develop your web site on your computer and upload it to your web site host. Some web site hosts (known as "web site in a box") only allow you to use their web based editing tools to develop your web site online. This type of web site will not work with Smart Contractor.

If you have a web site with read/write/delete access via FTP, then you can set Smart Contractor up to create and update customer job web sites. Then, when you exit Smart Contractor, the Exit form will include an option to Publish To Web Site. Click Run Exit Options to automatically create and update your customers' web sites. If you want to update the web sites without exiting Smart Contractor, you can use the Publish To Web Site option in the Utilities Menu.

The Web Site Publishing Setup form has the following prompts:

Publish Customer Job Info To Company Web Site:

Check this option to enable Smart Contractor to publish customer job information to your web site.

Company Web Site FTP Address:

Enter the FTP access address for your web site. This can be in the form of a URL (example: ftp://ftp.companysite.com/), or an IP address (example: 123.12.23.123).

FTP Login Username:

Enter your FTP login username.

FTP Path:

Some web servers store the files of the web page in a folder below the folder accessed by FTP. If that is true in your case, enter the web site folder path here.

Important: Remember that UNIX based servers are case sensitive. This means that if your web hosting server is not a Windows server, then the path name must be spelled using the correct case for each letter.

FTP Login Password:

Enter your FTP login password.

FTP Port Number:

Enter the FTP Port Number, which is typically 21.

Customer Login Path:

Enter the path name that your customers will use to access the customer login page on your website. For example, if you set the customer login path to "customerlogin", and your website URL is www.CompanyName.com, then your customer will type "www.CompanyName.com/customerlogin" into their web browser address to get to their login page.

NOTE: If you use more than one Smart Contractor database, then the customer login path name must be different in each database. If they are named the same in more than one database, then when you publish customer information to your website, the customer login information from one database will be overwritten by the customer login information from the other database.