Invoice - Custom Design Header for No. 9 Double Window Envelope

L. D. James ljames at apollo3.com
Thu Mar 19 11:50:14 EDT 2015


On 03/19/2015 10:31 AM, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
> On 3/19/2015 9:42 AM, L. D. James wrote:
>> Does anyone know of some way, plugin or workaround for Invoice design 
>> that will correctly place the company return address and the 
>> customer's address for a No. 9 Double Window Envelope (CO165)?
>>
>> If nothing else, hopefully someone might have some knowledge of how 
>> the style sheets are stored so that I can try to manually edit the 
>> specification.
>>
>> Thanks in advance for any suggestions or comments.
>>
>> -- L. James
>>
>
>
> This is precisely the sort of thing that you don't (or shouldn't) want 
> inside the accounting package. What you do is produce the output from 
> gnucash as a file and then process that file through a "batch editor". 
> For crying out loud, if you had a large volume to mail out, you'd be 
> wanting them presorted and batched  by zip code. Expect THAT from 
> inside the accounting package?
>
> Those of us who worked (or still work) in the cypher mines will tell 
> you, keep things as independent as possible. If next year you have a 
> slightly different envelope window placement you DON'T want to have to 
> touch an accounting program to make the necessary adjustment. The 
> folks in the "print room" who are going to do things like testing the 
> fit into envelopes don't require access to the books!
>
>
>
> Michael D Novack, FLMI
>
> PS: If you give it a little thought, you will probably be able to come 
> up with a whole bunch of other things you might want to do. Split off 
> those longer overdue and/or larger amounts for a special insert? Split 
> off large/important customers for a special insert? That presort by 
> zip separating out the zips for which you can get a lower postal rate 
> by batching?
>
> PSS: It's the "batch editor" where you should be doing things like 
> changing fonts, inserting logo graphics, etc.
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I appreciate the input.  I've been using Peachtree for 20 years. I'm 
doing the best I can with making this transition.  I have spacial 
invoice paper (kind of expensive) that I can't currently use do to this 
software change.  If I could learn how to start out with something like 
what I've described above, I'll use the same technique to proceed to 
custom design to use my invoice stock paper.

I'm not a large business.  So I don't fully understand everything you've 
described about the problems or how to use workarounds to produce the 
preferred formated invoices.  I'll continue to study your message and 
try to understand the tip.

But in the meantime, I can't understand how having a method for custom 
designing reports can have such a negative effect on a business.

I'm currently using the insert workaround that you referenced.  I 
understand that I'm not the best authority, but I have a few problems 
with this (which I understand is most likely, just me). But I try to 
minimize the size of the package.  Having an extra insert is possibly 
giving the receiver more junk and adding an extra print.

It appears that most (if not all) of my vendors has headers that matches 
the envelope... the electric bill, cable bill, gas bill, and other big 
companies.  Having address headers that matches the envelope window 
appears to be more professional (to me).

For my modest company, spending a lot of time (hours, days, months) to 
get a template of this time would save a lot of time in the end. From 
your comment, it appears that this isn't going to be an easy task.  But 
hopefully someone with some knowledge of the details of accessing the 
templates can help me with where to start.  If nothing else, just the 
request might inspire the developers of gnucash to feature a more 
diverse style editor for the various reports.

Thanks for the comment on the "batch editor".  Being new to gnucash, 
this might be where the desired template/feature exist.  I'll be 
studying the details of what that is in meantime.

-- L. James

-- 
L. D. James
ljames at apollo3.com
www.apollo3.com/~ljames


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