T.O.M. Help Desk

Many documents in TOM (offers/quotes, order confirmations, invoices etc.) can be printed in MS-Word (2000 and higher). But why should you do this? For one thing, the layouts in the Word templates are modifyable much easier than those in TOM, especially since translators are more or less familiar to working in a text editor like Word. Also, the layout options in Word are many more than those in FileMaker Pro.  The other reason is that AFTER creating the offer (or whatever) with standard data from TOM it is easy to manually edit the text that was transferred to Word. This comes in especially useful in quotes, where little and big text adaptations are quite common.

The following paths need to be set right for all of this to work:

TOM Documents sub-folder as output folder, where TOM will automatically save the newly created document; set this path in >User Settings >Forms

Templates folder (containing Offer.dot, Invoice.dot etc.) ; default is:

…\TOM 10 (or FileMaker Pro 11)\Documents\__Templates

(define this path in >User Settings >Forms )

Customizing the MS-Word templates

The templates can be modified quite freely. However, there are some issues to be considered.

• Font, font size and style can be edited freely
• Layout elements (logos, graphics etc.) are optional
• Table characteristics (frame, background, column width and text alignment) can be changed, but not the number and order of columns!
• Table size (i.e. the number of rows) should ideally correspond to the maximum possible size of invoices or other forms. E.g., if your invoices are never longer than one page it will be unnecessary to maintain a three-page table in the template. This will cause no harm, but it takes some extra time each time you print (see below).
• When you shift bookmarks in Word, make sure you are shifting the ENTIRE bookmark
• MS-Word displays bookmarks in brackets []. Use Word’s Extras menu ( >Extras >Options >View) to make them visible or to hide them.
• If you do NOT want a certain value in TOM to appear on your Word form simple delete the corresponding bookmark in the respective Word template.
• Always make backups of your Word templates, especially in the beginning — working with bookmarks is rather tricky
• Whatever changes you make to your templates — do not rename them! The file names in the template folder may not be changed.

Useful information about invoicing:

• the invoice layout is defined under >User settings >Forms >Letter.
• the wording on the invoice form is defined under >User Settings >Forms >Invoice.
• invoices can also be printed in MS-Word
• multi-project invoicing
• generally, each sub-project will appear as an invoice item (exceptions).
• you can create more than one invoice from a project (Partial invoices)
• you can create an invoice for the current project specifically
• you can create an invoice from within a sub-project for that particular sub-project only.
• you can decide whether or not to print project-related sub-totals on your invoice.
• you may include or exclude the client’s department and/or contact in the invoice address
• you can add a general custom notice to the invoice
• you can also add free invoice text to any sub-project 
• each new invoice appears as an Open item in the Finance section (outgoing invoices)
• invoices can be re-printed at any time later from within TOM
• “batch invoicing” creates invoices from a list of completed projects