Sending Invoices by email

by Wes Hooper

3rd February 2009

Published in: Business Management

Moobiz creates snazzy looking invoices for your business which look great when printed. Up until recently we'd been printing our Mooloop invoices to a PDF printer (the awesome, and free, PDFCreator) and emailing the PDF as an attachment.

While this works fine, we wanted to speed up the process and our long term plan has always been to send invoices directly as HTML formatted emails.

We've now been testing this ourselves for a while, mostly ironing out bugs caused by email program incompatibilities, but with one missing feature holding us back.

For our own records, we wanted to keep a copy of the invoice "as sent" in our mailboxes the same way as if we'd sent it using an email program. For a while we thought about trying to save a copy into your "Sent Items" folder, but we'd have needed access to your email account and it seemed complicated.

We left the problem for a bit and carried on with testing, getting to the point where we had the basics working of emailing the invoice to the nominated Accounts Department contact and / or invoicee:

A little while later, we realised we'd been making it too complicated, thought about what we were actually trying to achieve and came up with the now obvious and much simpler solution, just CC the email to whoever is sending the invoice.

For now, we've made it opt-out if you really don't want a copy, but we'll probably come back to this another time as we'd rather have fewer options and things to click.

A quick tidy up of the wording along with removing the greeting fields (which weren't really used anyway!) and we were done: