Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

7–43. E-Mail Invoices in Acrobat Format

It can be extremely difficult to obtain payment for some invoices. This problem usually arises when the approval of a specific individual at a customer is required and that person is either rarely available or so disorganized that the paperwork invariably disappears. Traditional approaches have been to attempt routing an invoice around the person in question, repeatedly mailing or faxing copies of it, or e-mailing reminders at regular intervals. Despite the variety of possible actions, this can become a frustrating impasse that may take months to resolve.

Of the approaches just noted, the one that works best is a reminder e-mail to the approving party, because that person can simply forward the e-mail to the accounting department with a note asking to expedite the payment. However, the problem with e-mails is that a perfect copy of the invoice cannot be included with the e-mail message, which could otherwise be forwarded straight to the accounting department with an approval notation by the approving party. Another problem is that the approving party may not have seen the invoice, and so may claim that he or she cannot approve it.

Adobe’s Acrobat software has eliminated these problems by making it possible to create a perfect copy of an invoice as printed by any accounting system and to save it into a PDF file that can be attached to an e-mail ...