Emailing payslips and reports using Gmail

This guide shows you how to email payslips and reports from Payroll Manager to your employees / employers using a Gmail account. If you wish to use a ‘non-Gmail’ email account instead then please refer to the relevant guide below:

Emailing payslips and reports using Microsoft Outlook, Office 365 or Hotmail

Emailing payslips and reports (this is for all other email account types (i.e. non-Microsoft or Gmail).

Using this guide

There are 3 main sections:

Set up and testing
Sending payslips and reports by email
Troubleshooting

1. Set up and testing

In order to send emails from Payroll Manager you first need to provide the software with your Gmail settings. Payroll Manager then attempts to send a ‘test’ email to check that the details you have entered are correct.

Click ‘Tools‘ then ‘Email‘ then ‘Setup‘ from the main menu in Payroll Manager.

Click on the ‘Select pre-set‘ button and select ‘Gmail‘ from the list the list. The ‘Host’, ‘Port’, ‘Connection security’ and ‘Authentication method’ boxes will be populated automatically.

gmail server start tls

Gmail require that you use ‘2-step verification’ and a special ‘App Password’ (or similar), provided by themselves, in order to use their servers with third party software such as Payroll Manager, rather than using your ‘regular’ Gmail password. You should generate this ‘App Password’ before proceeding further – please see our guide Google 2 Step Verification and App Passwords. Once you have set up Google ‘2-step verification’ and have generated the ‘App Password’ then you can continue with the setup below:

gmail user details

Username: This is the username issued to you by Google. Typically your username will be the part of your email address before the ‘@gmail.com’ symbol e.g. if your email address is ‘[email protected]’ then your username is likely to be ‘lawrenceedwardpage’. It is also possible that your username may be entirely different from your email address. If in doubt you should contact your email provider.

Password: Enter the App Password that you generated previously. For security reasons the password will not be visible as you type it into this field, so please be especially careful when doing so. If you choose to ‘copy and paste’ your password from the Google webpage then double-check that you are not inadvertently pasting ‘hidden’ spaces or characters into this field. Passwords are case sensitive, so ensure that you do not have ‘Caps Lock’ enabled on your keyboard (unless of course your password really is all upper case).

Sender’s email: This is simply the email address from which you wish the email to be sent – i.e your email address. Please note that many email servers will only allow you to send from the email address associated with the username.

Sender’s name: Enter the name of the person / organisation that you wish to appear in the ‘From’ field of the email. You can enter anything you like here, typically your name, or the name of your business.

The remaining items towards the bottom of the screen should be ignored at this point, and you should click ‘OK’ to continue. You can edit these settings later if necessary after having successfully sent a test email through the software. More information about each item is given below:

CC all emails to: this is an optional field and can be left blank if you wish. Enter the email address of a recipient that you wish to receive a copy of all emails sent through the software.

BCC all email to: this is an optional field and can be left blank if you wish. Enter the email address of a recipient that you wish to receive a blind copy of all emails sent through the software.

Edit email templates (button): It is possible to define templates to be used when sending emails. For more information, click this button, then click on the ‘Help’ button on the next screen.

Send emails immediately: This box is ticked by default. If you wish for the software to temporarily ‘hold’ the emails for sending at a later time then you would untick this box.

Use these settings in all data files: If you are a payroll agent and wish to use the same email settings for all clients then ticking this box means that these settings will appear in all of your payroll files.

Once you have clicked ‘OK‘ at the bottom of this screen, a box will appear asking if you wish to send a test email with these settings (below) – click ‘Yes‘.

Next enter the address that you wish to send the test email to. This should be your email address, so that you can check that the email has been received. Click ‘OK‘

The next screen will show details of the test email, which the software will attempt to send immediately.

If the test email has been successful then a message will appear to indicate this and you are ready to move onto the ‘Sending payslips and reports by email‘ section below. If instead you receive an error message (which can sometimes take 30 seconds or so to appear) then first double-check that you have entered your details correctly on the ‘Email setup’ screen before working your wat through the ‘Troubleshooting‘ section towards the bottom of this guide.

2. Sending payslips and reports by email

Payroll Manager is able to create emails, attach PDF copies of payslips and reports to those emails, and send these to the recipient via your email server. Each PDF document can be automatically password protected, and the software keeps a ‘log’ of all emails that have been sent.

Make sure that the recipients email address has been entered into the software. To enter the email address of an employee, click ‘Employees‘ then ‘Employee details‘ from the main menu in Payroll Manager then click on the ‘Personal‘ tab. Immediately below the E-mail field is a box marked ‘PDF password‘. If you wish for Payroll Manager to automatically password protect PDF documents that are sent by email (which for GDPR purposes is strongly recommended) then you should enter a suitable password into this field. The recipient of the email will need to enter the same password in order to open the PDF document.

(Similar ’email address / PDF password’ boxes can be found on the ‘Employer – Employer Details‘ screen, which you should complete if you intend to use Payroll Manager to send documents by email to the employer.

You can enter multiple email addresses, separated by just a space, if you wish to send the email to more than on address. The software will then separate each address by a semi-colon and three spaces.

Produce the payslips (or report) on screen in the normal way (e.g. for payslips, click ‘Pay‘ then ‘Employee Payslip‘ from the main menu in Payroll Manager, and select the relevant employees). The example below shows how to send employee payslips by email, but the same method applies should you wish to send an Employers Summary report (for example) to the employer.

Click on the ‘E-mail report‘ button on the report toolbar.

If you are sending employee payslips by email, then you will see a list of options (below). If you are sending a different report (e.g. an ‘Employers Summary’ to the employer) then these options will not appear, and instead you will be taken directly to the ‘Email templates’ screen (further below).

When sending employee payslips you have 4 options:

E-mail to each employee (separate PDFs, employee passwords) – This is the most commonly used option and should be selected when you wish to send a payslip directly to each employee. A separate email will be sent to each employee containing only their own PDF payslip (password protected as applicable).

The 3 remaining options are typically used by payroll agents when producing payslips on behalf of their clients:

E-mail to the employer (separate PDFs, employee passwords) – This option sends one single email to the employer. This email will contain separate pdf documents (one for each employee), protected (if applicable) by each employee’s own password. You might choose this option if you are an agent processing the payroll on behalf of an employer who wishes to issue pdf payslips to their employees themselves but has provided you with individual employee passwords to use.

E-mail to the employer (separate PDFs, employer password) – This option sends one single email to the employer. This email will contain separate pdf documents (one for each employee), and each PDF payslip will be password protected (if applicable) by the employer password. You might choose this option if you are an agent processing the payroll on behalf of an employer and wish to email these payslips securely to the employer but do not wish to set up individual employee passwords.

E-mail to the employer (one PDF, employer password) – This option sends one single email to the employer, containing one single pdf document (password protected as applicable) detailing each employees payslip information. You might choose this option if having separate PDF payslip documents is not important to the employer.

Once you have made your selection, click ‘OK‘ .

The ‘Email templates‘ screen will appear. Click on the ‘Preview‘ button at the bottom of this screen if you wish to see how the body of your email will appear to the recipient. The ‘default’ template provided in the software will be suitable in most cases.

(It is possible to create and edit your own email templates if you wish. Details of how to do this are beyond the scope of this guide – click on the ‘Help‘ button at the bottom of the Email templates screen to find out more).

Click ‘OK‘ to send the email(s). A message will appear once they have been sent to your email server.

The time taken for your email server to deliver the email(s) to their final recipient will vary between providers, but typically this should not take more than a couple of minutes.

Payroll Manager keeps a record of all successful emails. Click ‘Tools‘ then ‘Email’ then ‘Log‘ from the main menu in Payroll Manager should you wish to view this record.

3. Troubleshooting

Payroll Manager relies on a number of things being in place and set up correctly in order to be able to send emails. For example, the username/password credentials that you enter into the ‘Tools – Email – Setup’ screen must be complete and accurate. The email server settings must be correct. The email server that you are using must allow third party software to connect to it via SMTP. Your antivirus/firewall software/router must not be set to block Payroll Manager from establishing such connections etc. All of these things are out of the control of Payroll Manager, and if you are having problems sending emails then the solution will often lie outside of the software itself.

Error messages

EITHER -If you see an error message beginning “Your email provider is refusing to send the emails….” then this signifies that Payroll Manager has been able to connect to the server of you email provider, but that the server has, for whatever reason, refused to send the email(s) on to their recipients. As stated on this error message, you should contact the support Gmail and to ask them why their server is refusing to send emails. Please also check the Links section at the bottom of this guide.

OR – If you are seeing a “Could not connect to the email server” or “Could not connect..” error message then this means that Payroll Manager has attempted to make a connection to your email server, using the credentials supplied, but has been prevented from doing so. This may happen for a number of reasons, including:

– Your computer does not currently have an internet connection, or

– Your computer does have an internet connection, but your Antivirus/Firewall is blocking Payroll Manager from using it, or

– Your Antivirus / Firewall software is allowing Payroll Manager access to the internet, but the email server settings that you have entered are incorrect, or

– The email server settings that you have entered are correct, but the username / password that you have entered are not, or

– Your username and password are correct, but your email provider is not allowing access to its servers to third party software (such as Payroll Manager).

Each of these reasons results in a similar error message being returned to Payroll Manager, so you must systematically check each possibility in order to find a solution.

Step 1

First make sure that you have the latest version of Payroll Manager installed by clicking ‘Help‘ then ‘Program Update‘ from the main menu.

Check that you have the correct information entered on the ‘Tools – Email – Setup‘ screen (as described in section 1 of this guide – ‘Setup and testing’)

Go through each field individually and double-check what has been entered. When you press ‘OK’ the software will ask if you wish to send a test email – so you can make changes and repeat this process as many times as you need.

– Email setup : If you are using one of the ‘pre-set’ server settings, then the ‘Host‘ and ‘Port‘ are likely to be correct, but it is worth checking these with Google just in case. If you have entered these manually then double check that you have used the correct credentials. The most common setting is STARTTLS and Port 587.

– Username: Check that you have entered this correctly. If you have entered e.g. ‘[email protected]’ as the username, then try entering just ‘lawrenceedwardpage’ instead (and vice versa).

– Password: Try removing and re-entering your password in case you mis-keyed it initially. Be aware of whether or not you have Caps Lock or Num Lock active on your keyboard.

– Sender’s email: Make sure that you have the correct address entered here (i.e. typically your/your company’s email address). Please note that many email servers will only allow you to send from the email address associated with the username.

The other items on this screen (senders name, cc, bcc etc) do not affect whether or not an email can be sent, so these can be ignored when troubleshooting.

Step 2

If you are still having problems after having checked the contents of the email setup screen then the connection problem may be caused by antivirus or firewall software, either on your computer or your router.

Many antivirus providers have features built into their software which specifically block outgoing SMTP (Secure Mail Transfer Protocol) messages, the method used by Payroll Manager to send email. We recommend that you look at the support page of your antivirus provider to see if this is the case, or perhaps use Google to search for the keywords “SMTP blocked xxxxx”, where “xxxxx” is the name of your antivirus provider. You may find that your antivirus software has a setting to turn this particular feature off, which may solve the problem. If your antivirus software has ‘chosen’ to block Payroll Manager from sending emails then obviously there is nothing that Moneysoft can do to get around this.

We do occasionally receive feedback from Payroll Manager users who have identified that it was their antivirus software that was preventing emails from being sent and who then provide us with a link to the relevant support page of that provider. These links can be found in the ‘Links‘ section, below.

Step 3

If you have tried each of the suggestions above and are still not able to send emails using Payroll Manager then there a few other things that you could try:

– Try using a totally different email account to see if you can send a test message – e.g. if you were using a Gmail account, then try using a ‘Mail.com’ account, or an ‘Outlook.com’ account instead.

– Install Payroll Manager on a different computer and try sending a test email from that machine.

You should also be aware that providers of free email accounts (such as Google) often have no interest in allowing you to send emails via a third party software and would much prefer you to use their own online interfaces where they can show advertising and encourage you to use their other services. If being able to send emails directly is very important to your business then we would suggest that you consider an email provider that is set up to allow simple SMTP access to its servers.

Finally, if you are in a position where you need to urgently send payslips to employees by email and can’t manage to do this directly from Payroll Manager then it is of course possible to save each payslip as a PDF document (by clicking on the ‘Save as pdf’ button on the toolbar) and then attach these to an email that you create manually with your email software.