SalesPad Smart Printing for Business Central makes printing and emailing routine documents an automatic, no-brainer task.  Instead of needing to comb through and remember all of the exact documents that need to be printed for every special situation, Smart Printing whittles down the options to only those that apply for this specific document, customer, and item list.  Simply set up your business rules for which documents are generated when, and where they should be sent, and make it easy for your people to follow through.

Combine Smart Printing with Mission Control to fully automate printing and emailing in workflow.  No more missing pick instructions or forgotten customer email confirmations - every single order automatically prints the right documents and sends the right emails as it travels through your sales workflow.  No extra clicks needed.  And whether it’s manual or automated, every single Smart Printing action is added to a comprehensive audit log for straightforward accountability and troubleshooting.

What It Looks Like

Printing from a Sales Document

Smart Printing can be triggered manually for any supported sales document directly from the action bar, both from individual document cards and from document list pages.

The Smart Printing actions are found in the document's action bar under Actions → SalesPad Smart Printing → Print/Email.  If you do not see the Actions tab, select More Options (the … at the right of the action bar) to reveal the full set of tabs.

The SalesPad Smart Printing submenu contains two actions:

• Print/Email - Open the Profile Selection lookup to see all active print profiles that qualify for this document, then select one or more profiles and select OK to run them.

• Audit Log - Open the Audit Log pre-filtered to entries for this document.

From a document list, click the … button and select the Print/Email action to print or email the document without needing to open it.  If you do not see this action, you can reveal more actions via the Select More option at the bottom.

When you choose to Print/Email, the selected print profile determines what is printed or emailed:

• If Enable Printing is on and Local Print is on: the report is rendered to PDF and downloaded to your browser.

• If Enable Printing is on and Local Print is off: a print job is dispatched silently to the configured BC printer.

• If Enable Emailing is on: the report is rendered, recipients are resolved, and the email is sent.

A log entry is written to the Audit Log for every print and email action, whether it succeeded or failed.  If any errors occur, a message is displayed on the screen.

Automatic Workflow Printing

Mission Control workflow provides a Smart Printing action when the Smart Printing add-on is installed.  This works just like Smart Printing in SalesPad for GP, where printing and emailing can happen automatically as sales documents progress through workflow, no user intervention needed.  

Considerations

• All eligible print profiles run: every profile that qualifies for the document executes automatically. If none qualify, the action is considered successful and completes silently.

• Local Print profiles are skipped: Local Print requires a browser session, which isn't available during a workflow submission.

• Logs are created in two places: each execution is written to both the Smart Printing Audit Log and Mission Control's Activity Log.

• Failures are isolated: a failure in one profile does not stop others from running and does not fail the workflow action itself.

• User Email eligibility applies situationally: for Automated Actions, no user identity is passed and any profile with a User Email filter will never qualify. For manual workflow submissions, the submitting user's email in Mission Control is used, which can only match if that person has the same email in both systems. Send to Current User behaves in a similar manner: no address when automated, Mission Control user email when manual.

Auditing

The Audit Log records an entry for every print and email action dispatched by Smart Printing. It can be used to review history and help diagnose failures. Note that the log records if an action was successfully dispatched, but it cannot confirm end-to-end-delivery for the destination printers and email addresses.

• To review audits for a sales document, load that document and then select Actions → SalesPad Smart Printing → Audit Log.  This will show prints and emails for this document across all applicable print profiles.

• To review audits for a print profile, load that Print Profile Card and then select the Audit Log action.  This will show prints and emails for this profile across all sales documents.

• To review audits across all documents and profiles, search for “SalesPad Smart Printing Audit Log” in Business Central.

Audit logs show the most recent activity first, and they cannot be edited or deleted.

Things To Keep In Mind

Smart Printing is not a printer management tool.  It routes to whichever Business Central printers are registered in BC Printer Management. The printer relay — whether Insight Works, 365 Business Print Agent, or any other — creates the BC printers; Smart Printing uses them.

Setup

License Activation

Smart Printing requires a license to operate. After you first install the extension, search for Assisted Setup in Business Central and locate “Set up SalesPad Smart Printing”.

1. Select Start Setup to open the activation wizard. If your tenant is eligible for a trial, select Begin Trial to start a free 30-day trial.
2. If your tenant already has a license, select SalesPad License Management to activate.

User Access

Before users can see or use Smart Printing, an administrator must assign each user a Smart Printing Role in Business Central's User Setup page.  Search for User Setup in Business Central

The Smart Printing Role column appears immediately after User ID. Select Edit List to make the column editable, then set the appropriate role for each user:

Important Notes

BC SUPER users are always treated as Admin regardless of the role field value.

New users default to None. Smart Printing actions are invisible until a role is explicitly assigned.

Print Profiles

A Print Profile is the central object in Smart Printing. It answers four questions:

• Which document type does this apply to? — e.g. Sales Order, Sales Invoice, Sales Quote.

• Does this document qualify? — checked via location, salesperson, user, customer attributes, header attributes, and line attributes.

• Which report and layout? — the BC report ID and optional custom or modern layout to use when rendering.

• Where does the output go? — a named BC printer (direct), the browser print dialog (local), an email to derived recipients, or a combination of the above.

The SalesPad Smart Printing Print Profiles list is the starting point for all print profile administration.  Search for SalesPad Smart Printing Print Profiles in Business Central.

• To create a new print profile, select New Profile in the action bar.  This will open a blank Profile Card.
• To delete a print profile, select a profile row and use the Delete action in the action bar, or open the Profile Card and use Delete in the Processing section. Deletion will prompt for confirmation.
• Select any profile to open the Print Profile Card and adjust settings for that print profile.

Print Profile Fields

The General section covers general information for this Print Profile.  The Eligibility section controls when this profile is a candidate for a given document.

The Profile Status must be set to Active for users to see and use that print profile.  All profiles start in Draft status, where only admins can see and test them, so they can be fully validated before they are used.  Profiles can also be set to Inactive to block their use while preserving their configuration and audit log history, and they can be reactivated at any time.