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.
- Visual Basic Programming skills
- HTML and CSS
- 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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[…] our last article we looked at the E-Statement Basics and what you will need to have before you are able to develop this application. Today we are […]