Publish Customer Documents

How Do I... 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 on the web.

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 specified documents 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 their own separate web page that provides links to uploaded job information documents.

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 server 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 server. 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 your customers' web sites without exiting Smart Contractor, you can use the Utilities > Publish Customer Documents option in the Utilities Menu.

If you want to customize the appearance of the uploaded customer web pages to integrate with the appearance of your website, see the help information for the Setup > Other > Website Publishing menu option.