Appreciation post: The $50,000 invoice I almost lost because of a bad PDF.

I was in my home office last Tuesday, about to send a final invoice to our biggest client. The PDF looked fine on my screen, but when their AP person opened it, all the line items were garbled text. She emailed me saying the file was corrupt and they couldn't process it. My heart just sank. I spent the next two hours on the phone with their IT and mine, trying to resend it, convert it, everything. Finally, I just rebuilt the invoice from scratch in a different program and sent it as a simple, flat image file. It worked. It made me realize how fragile our basic processes are. A tiny tech glitch can hold up real money. Has anyone else had a payment get stuck because of a simple file format?

3 comments

3 Comments

brookep621mo ago

Tech is a real weak link sometimes. I've had checks delayed for weeks over a bad scan. It's crazy how much trust we put in these little files.

gavin_clark1mo agoMost Upvoted

That exact thing happened with a property manager I work for. Their system choked on a detailed cleaning quote I sent. The solution was painfully simple in the end. I started printing everything to a basic, old school PDF printer driver instead of saving directly from my program. The file size is bigger, but it creates a rock solid, flat document that always opens. Never had a corrupt file since switching to that method.

evan_dixon6723d ago

Man, that's a rough spot to be in and I feel for you, @gavin_clark. It's always the simple stuff that ends up being the fix, isn't it? You'd think in this day and age the software would just work, but here we are hacking around it with old school tricks. I've seen similar headaches where a system just refuses to play nice with a perfectly good file for no real reason. At least you found something that sticks, even if it feels like a step backwards.