The Scenario
You create a brand new mailing with Business Edition, using an existing .dbf file. The mailing has all the required criteria to qualify for Standard Mail automation letter rates. You’ve configured your presort settings correctly. You end up with machinable letter rates… The mailing may look something like this:
What’s happening?
For situations such as this, it’s common to see this:
See it? We have a ZIP+4 and delivery point, which is what Postalsoft would need to presort an automation mailing. However, Postalsoft needs to know what data it is looking at in order to know how to use it. In the screenshot, notice how many of the fields have a Normal field kind. The field kind is what tells Postalsoft how it should treat the data. Normal fields are reserved for user data, which is not used by Postalsoft in any way to prepare a mailing.
The Fix
For our example, in order to get automation rates, we would need to correct the field kind for the delivery point (in our example, named DPBC). It’s also a good idea to look at other normal fields, because many of them are used by other functions in Postalsoft, such as address correction. Here’s the corrected version of our example:
In Short
If you are not getting the results you expect, one of the first things to check is your field kinds. Postalsoft is usually fairly smart about assigning field kinds when you import a file. If the file being imported already has a field name that Postalsoft uses, then Postalsoft would know what field kind to use for that field.
