There are times when you want invoices to be emailed to multiple receiving addresses. You may want to send a copy to the purchasing agent, the accounts payable clerk, the job foreman, and others. The QuickBooks customer record has two fields, Main Email and CC Email, so how can you easily send the invoice to more than two recipients?
Let’s take a look at a customer record in QuickBooks (Figure 1). You can see there are several places where you can enter an email address. But are they all usable?
Figure 1: Email fields in the customer record
You have two fields that work well, the Main Email and CC Email fields. These work as you would expect. Starting with QuickBooks 2013, Intuit added a number of additional fields where you can change the label of the field using a drop-down list of options. In Figure 1, you can see that I’ve selected “Alt Email 1” and “Alt Email 2” for these fields. That should give us four email fields for this customer, right?
Unfortunately, as you can see in Figure 2, those optional fields are not turned into “email” fields when you change the label, they just hold the information as text fields that have no special use. The only fields that are actually used as email fields are the Main Email and CC Email fields.
Figure 2: Email fields that are used
So those extra “alt” fields aren’t useful in this case.
The trick is that you can add multiple email addresses in a single email field if you separate them with a semicolon. As you can see in Figure 3, I’ve entered multiple addresses in the CC Email field (this also works for the Main Email field).
Figure 3: Multiple email addresses in CC Email
When I send an invoice to this customer, the entire content of the two email fields is used, and the email system should recognize those as separate addresses (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Email QuickBooks invoices to multiple recipients
Very simple!
The customer Main Email and CC Email fields each have a capacity of 1,023 characters. I’ve not tested the system with more than five or so email addresses in a field, but that should be plenty of room for the addresses you would want for one customer.