PDF eBilling

Presently, 60% of homes and more than 90% of businesses have Email so why not send your bills via Email rather than Royal Mail? With the increase in the use of Email in businesses and the home, the potential for sending your bills, statements and formal correspondence by Email is enormous.

Clearly the cost savings associated with sending your correspondence electronically are substantial. Standard first class mail (even with bulk discounts) is around 23p, our service can be as little as 2p per Email. This represents more than a 10-fold reduction in delivery costs alone. The saving is even greater when you factor in stationary, printing, production and staffing costs, none of which apply to electronic delivery.

The potential problems with Email delivery are these: -

1. The recipient might not consider an Email to be a ‘real bill.’

This is a matter of education. Companies and consumers have to be made to understand that you will only be billing electronically. If they ignore these Emails then you will act as you would if they ignored postal bills. Naturally, there is nothing to stop you billing these customers by post if they are troublesome.

More and more formal correspondence will occur via Email (because of the enormous cost savings associated with electronic delivery.) Companies and consumers will get used to paying bills received in this way and as a supplier you can pass on the savings to your customers, perhaps even charging a premium for ‘old style’ postal billing.

2. An Email is transient and there is nothing to keep.

Generally, people treat Emails less seriously than postal documents but, as we have mentioned, this will change. However the act of having something to ‘keep’ is important.

Our service does not send the bill in the text of the Email instead we attach an Adobe Acrobat PDF document. This file can be saved and ‘kept’ on their computer system.

PDF documents can be printed and filed just like a paper document. They can be viewed on any type of computer.

We can also publish these PDF documents to a password protected web page so that your customer can see all of the bills they have ever been sent. This information can be held forever as an historic record of their bills.

3. Emails do not look like your paper documents.

As you know, a PDF (Portable Document Format) file is an exact digital copy of a paper document. It can contain anything that can be represented on a printed page so therefore looks exactly like your paper documents.

4. Email can be unreliable.

This is simply not the case anymore. Tens of billions of Emails are sent across the Internet every day and the vast majority arrive in seconds at their destination without a problem.

Combine this with the fact that Email to both businesses and individuals is an important communications medium and therefore they need their Email to be reliable and it becomes a misnomer to believe that Email is unreliable.

However, occasionally something goes wrong with a person’s Email address and the message is returned. Our service includes full support for the processing of returned or delayed Emails so that you can bill by post any customers that are not receiving their messages.

We work with you accounts department to arrive at a format that we can use to receive your billing data. This can be, for instance, an Excel spreadsheet or an export for your accounts system. We then create a blank PDF template of your invoice stationary.

Each billing period (monthly, weekly, daily or ad-hoc) you send us a correctly formatted file. We create the PDF document for each bill and then transmit the Email to your customer. Copies can be sent to you and/or can be uploaded to a web site.

Any Emails that are returned or substantially delayed are forwarded to you for delivery by post.

The service is reliable and efficient, yet flexible and friendly.

1. Cost – Huge saving on postage and production costs.
2. Presentation – The PDF is as good as a printed document
3. Scalability – From hundreds to hundred of thousands of documents per month.
4. On-line History – Complete on-line record of all bills.