Send many posted invoices at once

After an invoice run there may be several hundred posted invoices that have to be sent to customers. One at a time is not a good solution. This article explains how Send and Post and Send work in Business Central, how document sending profiles save clicks, and what the limits are for sending email in bulk. You also get a practical workflow for a large invoice run, so no customers are forgotten.

What standard can do

From the Posted Sales Invoices page you choose Print/Send and then send as email, according to Microsoft Learn. The document is sent as a PDF, and the recipient is by default the customer's email address. On sales documents you can use Post and Send, so the two actions happen together.

Learn describes the steps for one document at a time. We did not find a page that describes selecting many posted invoices and sending them in one go. Test whether sending works on a selection in your setup.

It is a good idea to check that the customer's email address is actually on the customer card. Many errors when sending are caused by the field being empty or the address being misspelled.

Document sending profiles remove the dialog

On the Document Sending Profiles page you can create profiles and assign them on the customer card. You can mark one profile as the default for all customers. Post and Send shows the confirmation dialog with the profile that is used.

If the profile is set to use default settings, the Send Email page does not open every time. This is the biggest time saving today. Customers who want the invoice as an electronic document instead can be given a different profile.

Consider whether some customers would rather have the invoices as an electronic document. It can save both time and errors if the customer can receive them directly in their system.

Batch posting and scheduled posting

You can select several sales documents with the action Select More and post them as a batch. On the request page you specify what should be included. Errors are shown on the Error Messages page. Reports such as Batch Post Sales Invoices can also be scheduled in the job queue. Set strict filters, otherwise everything is posted, including documents that are not ready.

Limits for email

In practice this means that a large run takes time, and you should not expect all emails to have been sent in an instant.

The default limit is 30 emails per minute for Microsoft 365 accounts, corresponding to Exchange Online. It can be set per account.
Concurrency is 3 by default and can be raised to 10.
If emails are sent in the background through the job queue, Business Central retries up to 10 times. Failed emails sit in the email outbox with an error message.
Sent emails are on the Sent Emails page, so you can find them afterwards.

When is it worth automating

If you send few invoices a day, standard is more than enough. When invoice runs are large, the time goes on three things: choosing documents, correcting recipients and finding errors afterwards. Document sending profiles solve the first, the email addresses on the customer cards the second, and the email outbox the third.

If there are many customers without an email address, it quickly becomes manual work. Clean master data is therefore the cheapest improvement.

A practical workflow

Make sure each customer has a document sending profile and a correct email address. Post in batch. Then send, and check the outbox for errors. Keep the list of customers without email for manual handling.

The idea Bulk Document Sender is on our list of possible apps. It corresponds to several ideas on Microsoft's portal, including one about sending many sales invoices with about 205 votes. It is an idea we are considering, and not something you can download or buy.

Finally, check that the number of posted invoices and the number of sent emails match. The difference is the customers you have to follow up manually.