Files, images and printing

Before you start, open this page: Settings / PDF Templates.

Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.

Records can carry files. And documents come out of FeePrime looking like your business, instead of like a printout from a database.

Pictures and documents are two different things

Images are pictures meant to be looked at. A product photo. A member’s portrait. A photo of a delivery. They show as a gallery on the record and on your public website.

Documents are files meant to be kept. A signed contract. A supplier’s PDF. A scanned receipt. They are stored on the record and downloaded when somebody needs them. They are not displayed.

Use the right one.

A signed contract dropped into an image field on a product will end up on your public product page. That is a genuinely bad afternoon.

Photos are evidence

In practice the most valuable picture in FeePrime is not the nice catalogue shot. It is the photo somebody took at the moment something happened.

A pallet as it arrived. A crushed box. The state of something that came back. A meter reading.

Attached to the record, with the time it was added recorded alongside it, that photo settles arguments that would otherwise be one person’s word against another’s.

If you are standing there wondering whether to take the picture, take the picture.

Printing

Invoices, quotes, purchase orders and the rest print through PDF templates. These are layouts your business controls, so a printed invoice carries your logo, your colours, and the wording you want.

Two things follow from that.

Different document types can each have their own layout. And where there is more than one layout for a type, one is marked as the active one. That is the one that actually prints.

So if a printed document looks wrong, the fix is almost always in the template, not in the record.

Changing the record to work around a template problem means damaging your data to fix a formatting bug. That is always the wrong trade.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, add a photo to a product and see where it shows up. Then attach a document to a record and notice how differently it behaves.

Then print something, and compare the PDF against the record it came from.