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, letters, etc. 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.
To see a practical example of using a Word template, click here 
.
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's not 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 a cheque.
Result: no more trying to decipher handwritten scrawls and no more returned cheques when the customer has added up the totals wrongly.
To see an example PDF form that demonstrates all these features and more, click
here 
.
Note: if you cannot currently view PDF files you should download Adobe Reader free from the Adobe website by clicking on the button below (opens a new window).
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.
Copy-editing and proofreading†
Your website and printed publicity material are your potential clients' first contact with your business and, as such, it's essential that they present a professional image. Spelling errors, misplaced apostrophes and awkward sentence construction all detract from the message that you are trying to put across.
Poorly presented brochures and handouts may lead your prospective customers to assume (however unfairly) that you are as careless in your work as you appear to be in your publicity material.
But what can you do if you're not confident in the correct use of English grammar and you're concerned that poor presentation in your promotional literature might have an adverse affect on your business or service?
Well, you could employ us to do your copy-editing and proofreading for you. We outsource this work to an English Language A-level student, which not only means that he knows what he is doing, it also means that his hourly rate is very competitive. Services offered include:
- correcting spelling, punctuation, grammar and typographical errors;
- checking references and pagination;
- checking accuracy of diagrams and illustrations;
- improving wording and sentence construction;
- ensuring consistency of format;
- rewriting, if required, to fit your house style.
First impressions count, and if you have your promotional material professionally laid out, not only will it look better than it did before, more importantly, it will look better than that of your competitors.
Contact us for further details.
† In these days of desktop publishing, the division between copy-editing and proofreading has become blurred. Loosely speaking, copy-editing is the process of adapting submitted work (copy) into the house style (of, say, a newspaper or magazine or your company) while tidying up any spelling errors etc. along the way. Proofreading is the process of examining a preliminary printout prior to publishing the work to check for any mistakes that the copy-editor has missed or that have been introduced by the printer or printing process.