WhatsApp Business Messaging and Document Delivery

Why email is losing the conversation

In the Gulf, the wider MENA region and across South Asia, the commercial conversation happens on WhatsApp. A customer asks for a price on WhatsApp, your salesperson opens SAP Business One, raises a Sales Quotation, exports the Crystal Report to PDF, saves it to the desktop, opens WhatsApp Web on a personal number, finds the chat, attaches the file, and types a message. The quotation is sent from someone's personal handset. When that salesperson leaves, the entire thread leaves with them. Nothing about the exchange exists in SAP Business One.

The same pattern repeats for A/R Invoices, delivery confirmations and — most expensively — payment reminders. Collections staff work from an ageing report on one screen and WhatsApp on another, with no record in the ERP of who was chased, when, or what they replied. Emailed statements go unread; a WhatsApp message gets opened.

What ECOSIRE builds

ECOSIRE builds a per-tenant SAP Business One add-on that connects your company to the official WhatsApp Business Platform API through your own business account and sends documents directly from the SAP Business One document window. It is not a browser automation, not an unofficial gateway, and not tied to anyone's personal handset — it uses your verified business number, your approved message templates and your own API credentials.

Sending from the document

We add a Send on WhatsApp action to the document windows you nominate — typically Sales Quotation, Sales Order, Delivery, A/R Invoice, A/R Credit Memo and the Customer Statement. The action reads the Business Partner's contact numbers, lets the user pick which contact person to message, renders the document's Crystal Report layout to PDF, uploads it as a document attachment, and sends it with the approved template message. Attachment generation uses your existing print layouts, so the PDF the customer receives is the one you already send by email.

Templates, variables and languages

The WhatsApp Business Platform requires pre-approved templates for business-initiated messages. We build a template registry inside SAP Business One as a User-Defined Object: each entry holds the template name, its language, and the mapping from template variables to SAP Business One fields — Business Partner name, document number, document total, due date, currency, salesperson. Because your customer base is rarely monolingual, template selection can key off the Business Partner's language field, so an Arabic-speaking customer receives the Arabic template and everyone else receives English or Urdu.

Payment reminders that run themselves

We build a reminder engine driven by open A/R Invoice ageing. You define the stages — for example a courtesy note before due date, a first reminder a week past due, a firmer one at thirty days — and the conditions that suppress them: a Business Partner flagged as on hold, a customer in dispute, an invoice with a payment already applied, or a contact who has opted out. The engine runs on a schedule, resolves the customers due a message, and either sends automatically or queues messages for a collections user to release, depending on how you configure it. Every reminder writes back to the invoice so the ageing report and the message history tell the same story.

Opt-out handling is built in as a hard gate, not an afterthought. A customer who replies STOP, or is marked as opted out on the Business Partner master, is excluded from every automated send.

Inbound replies and the activity trail

We expose a webhook receiver for the WhatsApp Business Platform so inbound messages and delivery status callbacks come back into SAP Business One. Delivery, read and failure statuses are written to User-Defined Fields on the source document, so a user looking at an A/R Invoice can see that it was delivered and read on a given date. Inbound replies are logged as Activities against the Business Partner and linked to the document that triggered the conversation, which means the thread survives staff turnover and shows up in the Business Partner master where the rest of your history lives.

Media, size limits and fallback

The API imposes limits on document size and on the window in which you may send free-form messages. We handle both explicitly: oversized PDFs are sent as a secure link to the document rather than as an attachment, and outside the customer service window the add-on falls back to an approved template rather than failing silently. Where a number is not registered on WhatsApp, the send is marked as undeliverable on the document with a reason rather than being reported as sent.

Who this is for

Distributors, manufacturers, trading companies and service businesses running SAP Business One in markets where WhatsApp is the default business channel — the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and much of Southeast Asia and Africa. It suits companies where quotations are won or lost on response speed, and where collections depend on being read rather than filed.

Technical fit

The add-on targets SAP Business One 10.0 on Microsoft SQL Server and on SAP HANA, on-premise or cloud-hosted. Document data is read and written through the Service Layer, with the DI API used where required; message history, templates and consent flags are stored in User-Defined Tables and User-Defined Objects, and delivery state on marketing documents in UDFs. PDF rendering uses your existing Crystal Reports layouts. You supply and own the WhatsApp Business Platform account, the verified business number and the API credentials — ECOSIRE builds against them, and we will guide you through what needs to be in place, but we are not a reseller of the messaging platform and we make no claim of affiliation with it.

How delivery works

1. Scoping call. We agree which documents get a send action, which reminder stages you want, the template wording you will submit for approval, the languages in scope, and how consent and opt-out are recorded against your Business Partners.

2. Fixed quote. A written scope and a fixed price, issued before development starts.

3. Build. ECOSIRE builds the add-on against your account and your print layouts. Typical lead time is two to four weeks from signed quote. Nothing is pre-built.

4. Install in test. We install into your test company database, connect it to your sandbox or test number, and send real documents to your own handsets so you can see exactly what your customers will receive.

5. Install in production. After sign-off we install into production, switch to your live business number, and run the first reminder cycle with your collections team watching.

6. Support. A defined support window follows go-live, covering defects and configuration questions. Template approvals and any messaging charges are between you and the platform provider.