How to develop a commercial e-Statement application in vb6 step by step – Part 1- E-Statement Basics

 Building a Commercial e-Statement Application in VB 6/Sending Emails in VB 6

Most companies are trying to save the cost of printing by embracing the technology and going green. In this series of posts I am going to show you step by step on how I developed a commercial e-Statement application for a local bank in Kenya.
Each new post will build on the previous post until we have the final product. So you will need to keep track of the posts.

E-Statement Basics

What is an e-statement?

An e-statement is just an electronic means of receiving your regular monthly (or quarterly) account statement(s) from your bank , SACCO etc. Instead of receiving a paper statement by mail, you’ll receive an e-mail notifying you that your statement is available for viewing online or an e-mail with the e-statement attached. The statement  will look exactly like the paper version.

What are the benefits of receiving an e-statement rather than a paper statement?

There are several benefits to receiving an e-statement rather than a paper statement. E-statements:

Save time – E-statements are available the first business day of the month, up to a week sooner than mailed statements. Open and view your statements when it’s convenient for you.

Fight clutter – A paper statement is just one more thing for your files (or that pile on your desk), while an e-statement can be quickly and easily stored on your PC or a disk. If you need a statement copy for any reason, just print one from your disk.

Provide security – Identity theft still tends to be a low-tech crime, often the result of bills, credit card solicitations or financial statements swiped from a garbage can or mailbox. E-statements mean that less of your financial information is vulnerable to identity thieves, since you access them through a secure Internet connection, and only after you enter your unique  access code to open the PDF.

Save money – Printing and mailing statements costs a significant amount of money. When you select to receive an e-statement, the credit union saves. Since credit unions are cooperatives, those savings come back to you as lower loan rates, higher deposit rates and new products and services.

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Assumptions made

For you to be able to make sense of this course, you will need to have some basic programming skills and database skills.

1. Visual Basic Programming skills
2. HTML and CSS
3. Basics Microsoft SQL Server skills

So what will the end product be able to do?

• Login to the e-Statement application
• Setup your SMTP server and other Application Settings
• Send thousands of emails to different users with their attached e-Statement automatically by picking customer`s email addresses from the database and the PDF statement from a folder
• Have advertisements on each email sent to a user in the HTML body
• Have the HTML email body customized for each user with the “Dear so and so”
• I might also show you how to programmatically encrypt your PDFs e-Statement before you send them to your customers

I am going to share all the code with you as we go on building this application together. The code snippets will look like below:

Dim Fso As FileSystemObject
Dim num_files, j As Long
Dim files() As String
Dim FilterAccno As String
Public Con As ADODB.Connection
Dim Rs As New ADODB.Recordset
Dim processedItems As Integer
Dim sentItems As Integer
Dim unSentItems As Integer

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