Order Manager: Colors

Hello All,

I'm not sure if its something that I cant find or what, but is there a section in the order manager that tells you the colors the client picked to use in his/her design? Also, is there a way to include that information on the emailed invoice the customer receives?

All of that is available in Orders - Email & Export Templates.

I think what he is asking though is there a way to see how many and what colors are used in a design on the order page. I have always wanted this feature because I have to either open up the jpeg preview and guess or create a hires or reimport into the designer. It would be awesome if you could somehow see what colors are used in the design from the order page.

You can manipulate this data using Email & Export Templates. It takes a bit of work to build the template builder with all the data you want and place into the email notification your company receives or as another file type depending on how you use it. One thing we need from Alex is to export the color names instead of the rgb values that currently are exported (this may be already possible - been a while sense I looked at this).

Use the Email & Export Templates from your email or from the MANAGE ORDERS screen under EXPORT ORDER WITH TEMPLATE area on top right. Experiment. The email order to your company can be a very useful tool for managing orders if you get it all set up properly.

Also the more complicated method of using External Notification on Submittal process can be totally transparent when used with your own custom backend systems, but is well worth the trouble.

Having said all that . . . click the Reimport in Designer button on the Manage Orders screen to load the design and view the colors listed under each item panel. This is the sure fire way of associating each color accurately to each element in a design. When a customer calls declaring they chose color a, but received color b we have them open their confirmation email (that you have carefully crafted) and load the design back into the designer to see the colors they actually designed.

There's lots of power in these backend features when properly implemented. Perhaps as time permits we can suggest changes for Alex to code all this info into a more user friendly manner.

About named colors yes, it's possible.
The specialcode for the 1st RGB color, for example, is: [SIDES_TXTCOLOR_1]
the named color version is simply: [SIDES_TXTCOLORNAME_1]

Same "named" codes are available for first 9 colors of cliparts and shapes.

About making everything a bit easier, well... not that easy!
I mean, this tool is powerful because flexible, but it needs a bit of coding.
However, FYI, you know I will very soon release the specifics of the RTD API to the public.
I think I will also add a method to query an order# passing it an "export template", to have as result the template output itself.
It may be very useful because it will not need to be done from within the RTD, and could be the base to start building some sort of library for basic template outputs.

thanks for the info.

My question came from the accounting department here. Currently we dont have RTD set up to talk with quickbooks ( though I've been told that this can be done, but needs lots of programming?)... any way... When accounting logs into RTD to see the order manager it didnt say anywhere what the colors are so i figured i'd ask if there was a way to get that to show up there...

I figured that RTD looks at all the colors to know what to price to use, I just wasnt sure if there was a way for RTD to say, "ok, i checked the colors, you have a 2 color design, we used the 2 color price, those 2 colors are:"

No direct way to do that, but the export templates provides you all the tools to do that anyhow.
You may simply want to create a template to list the used colors, and create that template from within the "manage orders" page itself

@ psgraphics - if you are using paypal with RTD then this service works nicely getting Paypal to Quickbooks with very little effort:
Simpleport

Alex,
I am in the process of creating an invoice that is exported, and I am currently getting the RGB color number codes for the background color instead of an actual name. The special code I am talking about is [ITEM_BGCOLOR]. Is there anyway we can get the actual label name that we have entered into our color lists? The invoice is actually coming together rather nicely, but I have a couple problems I am encoutering, but I will make a new thread for that.

Funny, we were talking with Mark about this right yesterday.
And I said: so curious no one still asked for it!

Well, added the new specialcode: it's [ITEM_BGCOLORNAME]

That is interesting. Alex and Mark, maybe that is because background color is the only color listed for the design on the Manage Order page. Nice to have this also in the export options.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/07/2011 06:11AM by cos.

I think one term change may be needed ...

Background color from this point on should be known as Substrate Color.... because it is the color of the substrate (white, Black...whatever...whether it be a sign, shoe, shirt, paddle...pillow...you name it)...

Well, that code is for templates, which is to be used and seen only by admins. Customers, or in any case receivers of the "output", will see the wording you've chosen yourself.
Don't know if other users agree with me, but personally I don't really see the need of changing the "Background" term at admin side.