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Hello,
I'm self-employed and doing my accounts.
I send a lot of sms texts to customers telling them their work is completed with the total amount due.
In the past I have physically gone through each sms text and manually found the total amount due and inputted it into excel with the date.
It takes aggggggges. If I was more organised I'd have came up with another way. But haven't. Hey-ho.
I know there are programs of getting sms text (android) from phone to PC, but then is there a program that could extract specific information into excel? The total amount with the date.
I suspect if there is it would rely on repeat phrase it could pull out, luckily being a polite soul the info I want is phrased as ''Total amount due £XX please'' or ''Total due for parts and labor £XX please'' or a few other variants, but always ending with ''please''.
Is that enough to extract the info with the date? If it is a bit more complicated than just a few programs is there some service I could use to do it?
Many thanks for any input.
Extract all the sms messages you have and then just filter in the results Excel to keep the ones you want?
I did something similar to this many years ago, I'm racking my brains to remember what we used. We had a modem which took a SIM card. The software might have been RightFax, but I've slept since then.
Yeh I think I've used something like sms backup and restore for different but similar purposes.
You should end up with a big . Txt file.
Just dump the lot into excel.
You might want to clean it up a bit, remove unneeded columns as there's lots of guff but keep number, time, date, text content.
Filter by date or whatever..exclude dates that are old and you've already dealt with.
If you are religious about say always using a £ symbol or always or a key word like QUOTE in the text body you can filter to remove any row that didn't contain a monitary value or your chosen key word .
Looking forward, if you can set up a standardised sms template for quoting that could also save some effort.
A bit off a faff and a learning curve but once you've done it a couple of times it becomes easy.
Not a solution for today but...
From this day forward even if your client doesn't have an email create one
https://zapier.com/apps/sms/integrations/zoho-invoice
You can couple it with this so send an automated SMS to tell them they have an invoice to pay.
you can also share the invoice as a link via sms if done from a phone.
Then you also have mark paid or chase options
If you use chrome 'mighty text' might work for you.