Why, if PDF production is such a burden, don’t you charge for it, instead of trying to drive people to provide a ‘client portal’ to their customers and providers? More and more of our clients have requested PDFs to the point that now ALL of them have them (and want receipts attached as a single file for their own automated systems) - I note from searching the forum here that we are not alone in this.
I’ve looked at the QuickFile paid-for additions and none of them appeal, but having a PDF-producing (with non client-facing options) accounting system would be worth the money. The other features of QuickFile are appealing, but using it for plain accounting seems to require clunky work-arounds, meaning that ‘free’ is going to cost money in time used to perform the tweaking for each invoice.
I know I sound querulous, but really, trying to get customers or suppliers to visit a web-site to get invoices (which won’t contain the receipts), trying to get emails with ‘invoice’ and a web-link past spam-filters…
…so why not just charge for what some of your customers want? (Hint: try searching for PDF in the forum: you even have a FAQ about it).
Thank you for your suggestion. As I mentioned in your other thread, we’re happy to consider all suggestions, and we can take a look at the feasibility of them providing there’s enough support from the community.
I completely agree; most businesses, particularly larger ones and government funded, for example, have systems where they claim portals are incompatible to their procedures and that pdfs are absolutely essential if snail mail is to be avoided. In fact, occasionally, you are forced to abide by their online document processing system. Quite simply, their bean counters will refuse you as a vendor even if you have the best deal in the world for them as a vendor if you don’t do what they say regarding admin protocol. It is common with government funded organisations that their admin depts are robotic, inflexible and that the needs of their staff that actually do something in the organisation are completely secondary. Also, apparently, many have more powerful regulations to follow which they cannot change.
But, I am not sure what your beef is. We use Quickfile successfully with pdfs for everything. None of our customers have been made to use a client portal. The automatic QF emails can be reworded to omit client portal links. The wording on invoices is flexible and once a template is set, and do not need any mention of portal links. Yes, you have to tick a couple of boxes every time but we don’t find that a problem.
I’m sure it is very useful for some to see that a customer has viewed their invoice via a portal. Unfortunately, this advantage does not outweigh the need for pdfs in our particular business. If all or the majority of our business was B2C and not B2B, we would probably love this.
Have you exhausted all the options? What ‘tweaks’ are you having to do which are onerous?
(I sympathize - we have clients who not only want the receipts in the PDF and a timesheet in the same, but with variations and combinations that also have specifically-structured emails with the same information in text format for certain fields which must match the invoice, plus purchase order number, must come from a specific address, be encrypted, passworded… what fun!)
It isn’t that customers are forced to use the portal - it’s that in order to bypass that, I cannot have contact details without an email address (e.g. ‘Research & Ops Manager’, ‘Accounts Payable’) making importing fun, I must remember to tick or not tick for each invoice and so on. A recognized, simple configuration for those of us who must produce PDFs and the like would be handy. My issue is that QuickFile is good, but could be better for some of us (if I were not going to use QF, I would not be moaning). I’d be happy to pay for that and it seems an opportunity for QF to make money from what some customers want (I checked the forums to see whether I was unique in the PDF requirements and it appears not). It’s not a show-stopper for me in any way but if I don’t speak up, nobody will know.
I’ll look at the API and so on: I can write software to interact and produce PDFs in-house if it supports extraction.