CollectLane help

The email that arrives after your purchase has a short setup guide with your copy link in step 1. Open that link while you are signed in to the Google account you want the sheet to live in, then click “Make a copy”. The copy is yours. It goes into your own Google Drive and runs inside your own Google account, so there is nothing to install and nothing of ours running anywhere. Rename it and move it wherever you like. If the email has not arrived, check your spam folder first, then write to support@dispatch.tools and a person will send it again.

Reload the sheet and wait a few seconds. The menu is added by the script inside your copy when the file opens, so it appears a moment after everything else, to the right of Help. If it still is not there, make sure you are looking at your own copy rather than a preview of the original — the menu only exists in a copy you made and own.

Two steps, both once. 1. On the Settings tab, put your own address in “Send reminders to”. 2. Run CollectLane > Turn on the daily email, and approve Google's permission screen. From then on it goes out every morning at around 9:00, in whatever time zone the spreadsheet itself is set to — File > Settings inside the sheet, not your computer's clock. Change the time zone there and the email moves with it.

Tick “Select all”, then Continue. That notice is what Google shows for a script that lives inside your own copy of a sheet rather than in a published add-on, which is what a Sheets template is. The important part is ticking every box. Google lets you untick individual permissions, and a scheduled run cannot stop and ask you again — so a missing permission would show up only as an email that never arrives, every morning, with nothing to tell you why. Because of that, “Turn on the daily email” checks the permissions before it sets anything up, while you are still sitting there. If one is missing it stops and shows you Google's screen again, so running that menu item a second time is the fix. The script asks for this spreadsheet only, not for all your Google Sheets.

Three things account for nearly every case, in the order worth checking. 1. “Send reminders to” on the Settings tab is empty. That is also the off switch, so a blank there means no email by design. 2. The permission screen was not finished, or a box was unticked on it. Run CollectLane > Turn on the daily email again — it re-checks and will show you Google's screen if anything is missing. 3. Nothing needed chasing. If “Email only when something needs chasing” is on, a morning with nothing due or overdue sends nothing at all. That is it working, not failing. To see exactly what it would send right now, run CollectLane > Preview reminders. It sends no email and changes nothing in the sheet.

The Status column on the Main tab is a dropdown: Draft, Sent, Paid. Set it to Paid and put the date in “Paid On”. The row turns green and it drops out of the next morning's email. Paid rows stay on Main until you move them. When the tab gets long, run CollectLane > Archive paid invoices: it moves the paid ones to the Archive tab, where they stay readable and out of the way. Unpaid invoices are never touched by it, and it asks you to confirm before it moves anything.

Due dates are worked out as a row is typed or edited. Pasting many rows in one go does not trigger that for each one, so a block paste can leave the Due Date column empty. Run CollectLane > Catch up on new rows. It fills in the due dates for every row that is missing one, using the terms of whoever pays that invoice, and leaves rows that already have a date alone.

All of it is on the Settings tab, one row per client, and no name is ever typed twice. • “Pay in Days” is that customer's terms, and the due date on their invoices is worked out from it. A customer you have not set up yet falls back to “Pay in days for a new customer” in the options below the table. • “Reminders” is how many times you want to be reminded about one overdue invoice, and “In Days” is how far apart. New rows start at 3 reminders, 5 days apart. When an invoice runs out of reminders it is listed in the email as such, rather than nagging you forever. If several of your customers' locations are paid by one head office, put that head office in the “Pays As” column for each location and give the policy to the head office row only. The daily email then groups all of them together, so you chase the company once instead of each yard separately.

Clear “Send reminders to” on the Settings tab. That is the whole off switch — nothing else needs changing, and no trigger needs deleting. Put an address back in whenever you want it again. The sheet keeps working as a tracker either way; you simply stop being emailed about it.