I regularly send invoices in bulk but more of our clients are requesting PDFs. While I agree 100% that a link to the PDF should be enough, many clients forward these invoices in PDF form directly to their accounting software (just like the receipt hub in QF itself). So, having to download the PDF, save it, then send it from a file to their account system is a hassle they want to avoid.
Would you be willing to reconsider adding a “Send as PDF” option from the bulk send list? Ultimately I’m still using QF to send as PDF to these client it’s just that it adds multiple steps for me as I cannot include these clients on my bulk run.
The problem here (discussed elsewhere) is that the performance/bandwidth penalty is huge. Sending a single invoice as an attachment has a footprint 20+ times that of a simple email with a link. If you’re sending 50 at once then things will slow down immensely. We have a lot of users now with their own SMTP servers configured, we often see time-outs on user’s own SMTP servers sending single invoices. It would be much worse if we coupled this with bulk-send capabilities.
I will leave this open for now, perhaps in the future we could allow this as part of the power user subscription. I’d definitely like to see more support for this first.
Is there any data from the QF backend which shows how many or percentage of invoices sent (and it might be useful to filter by bulk invoicing) end up being clicked and a PDF generated by the recipient anyway?
I’d guess it is quite high and therefore the performance/bandwidth penalty can’t be much different other than the processing hit is probably spread out a little more when PDF files are not attached.
Although we typically send invoices without attaching a pdf so that we can use qf to track that people have received the invoice I could see this being an option I’d use if we bulk send invoices for items already paid for.
That’s basically the reason behind it I believe, it is highly unlikely that 50 users would all log in at nearly exactly the same time and hit the download links almost simultaneously.
What may be an option is sending the invoice as HTML, which is what I have the option of doing on a few other systems I use. This option is for pretty much the reasons outlined by @Glenn above, no huge attachments to send out in bulk, but it can still be forwarded with the email and has all the relevant information required.
I’d guess though with a bulk invoice upload that production of PDFs could be batch processed behind the scenes but qf might not want to go down that road.
@u4h37u at the moment sending 50 invoices off at once (with attachments) would squeeze all the computation into a short time-frame, which is much greater than if you were to send as an attachment individually or send 50 simple emails (no attachments). Generating the PDF requires a snapshot of the HTML to be made in the background then uploaded to our blob storage provider… any other way this would be done “on demand”. So there you have additional bandwidth and storage overheads.
The way to solve this would probably involve decoupling this process, i.e. you submit a bulk send request and the server works away in the background to dispatch them, spacing out the workload as needed. Much like how bulk print requests work.
Even to achieve the above would require a significant rewrite so it’s not a quick fix for us.
@Lurch embedding the invoice into the email would be a reasonable solution, although you really have no control over the design/layout as most web based clients will aggressively parse the output.
I was meaning send it as an HTML attachment, rather than embedding it. My mail client (Thunderbird) quite happily displays the HTML attachments correctly in the body of the email (this behaviour can be controlled by Thunderbird if I didn’t want this to happen), but if it didn’t then I could open it as I would any other attachment and let the default application display it which would be more compliant.
I can forward you one of the invoices I receive using this method if you’d like a look?
A HTML attachment would definitely be an option, and probably not that difficult to implement either, after all the PDF version is nothing more than a snapshot of some HTML. Leave this with me, I will explore this idea further.
Hello, I don’t know if anything has changed since this thread but all our invoices produced by recurring profiles are needing to be manually resent so that our customer receive the pdf in an email. Their processes are not flexible enough to allow them to log into numerous client areas as their ledgers are too big so they want us to comply with their way of working. As the customer is king - we find we must comply…
If there is a way of automatically sending the pdf it would remove a major overhead.