Business Documents
Carruthers Back Office Solutions can help you with your business documentation in a number of ways:
Production of standard business documents
You keep accounts because your accountant and the taxman require it; you produce quotations and invoices to secure the order or to get paid. They are an inescapable part of running a business but they are often regarded as a tedious necessity and tend to be generated reluctantly at the end of the working day.
But, quotations, invoices and those other items that you send to your customers (or potential customers) are all an opportunity to advertise your business. Are you exploiting this opportunity by applying company branding and a professional appearance to your paperwork? Or are your quotations handwritten on plain paper? Which approach is more likely to result in repeat business?
How much more professional it would look if you had standard versions of all your forms and letters pre-loaded with your logo, your address, the current date, the "look-and-feel" that you want to use, even your standard text; all available at the click of a mouse button.
This is all possible with Microsoft Word. The trick is to have a set of personalised templates that meet your company's individual requirements - and we can create such templates for you.
A practical example of using a Word template.
Contact us for further details.
PDF forms
Adobe® PDF (Portable Document Format) files are a popular and convenient method of distributing printed documents electronically from a website or via email. They have the advantage that the recipient doesn't have to purchase proprietary software in order to read them - the Adobe Reader® can be downloaded for free.
It's not just brochures and newsletters that can be converted to PDF files for distribution - even single-page forms can be ideal candidates. What's more, it isn't necessary to constrain them to being a lifeless imitation of the original document.
For example, take the simple order form. Typically a business will include a blank order form on its website as a PDF file. The user downloads the order form, opens it in Adobe Reader, prints it off locally, fills it in by hand (hopefully legibly), calculates the amount due (hopefully accurately) and then posts it to the originator with a cheque.
All very straightforward, but it fails to exploit the full power of PDF. By embedding data entry fields, checkboxes, dropdown lists and buttons into a PDF-based document, it is possible to design a form that interacts with the user, validates entered data and performs calculations on it.
These features create an 'intelligent' order form that is processed as follows: the user downloads the form, opens it in Adobe Reader and fills in the fields using the computer keyboard (thereby ensuring legibility). The intelligence in the form calculates the amount due, including applicable postage and quantity discounts, automatically according to the items and quantities selected by the user (thereby ensuring accuracy). The user then clicks on the form's Print button to print the completed order form locally, and posts it to the originator with the payment.
Result: no more trying to decipher handwritten scrawls and no more returned cheques when the customer has added up the totals wrongly.
Example PDF form that demonstrates all these features and more.
So, if you're troubled with lifeless forms, let us turn them into dynamic PDF documents that provide improved interaction with your customers. Contact us for further details.
If you can't view PDF files you can download Adobe Reader free from the Adobe website by clicking on the button below (opens a new window).
