Editing Invoices and Estimates with PDFfiller

Who?

Bolyard Lumber is south Michigan’s leader in upscale construction. A fourth generation family business, Bolyard Lumber is committed to providing the highest quality service, value, and work. For decades, Bolyard Lumber has worked closely with suppliers and clients to source the best materials and create the highest quality custom solutions. They provide a variety of bespoke solutions including installing doors, windows, cabinets, flooring, closets, and even doing interior millwork and sourcing lumber and deck materials.

In 2008, they were awarded Innovative Dealer of the Year and ProSales Online’s Excellent Showroom Award.

In 2008, Bolyard Lumber was awarded Innovative Dealer of the Year and ProSales Online’s Excellent Showroom Award.

The results show in the homes and businesses of clients, but also in the company’s bottom line. With 15 million dollars a year in revenue, multiple offices, and 70 employees, Bolyard Lumber is one of Michigan’s premier contractors.

Ross Josephson is a manager at the company focusing on window installations.

The Problem

When Josephson is creating invoices for customers he uses manufacturers’ proprietary software to generate estimates based on the materials used. This software works well as a means by which Josephson can accurately estimate the cost of a project, but often neglects to provide space for additional costs, which are then hard to add to the automatically generated PDF.

“The quote is being generated from my computer in software — as an example, Marvin Windows can generate proposals in their system,” said Josephson. But before PDFfiller, Josephson was left without a way to manipulate these quotes. “[The manufacturer’s] quote is great but it won’t let me put outside materials or costs in,” said Josephson. “Maybe there’s an element of a quote that I don’t want on there that the manufacturer of the software won’t allow me to remove.”

Before PDFfiller, Josephson had to go through a long and complicated procedure to edit his PDFs. “We would literally cut and paste [or] in a Word document it was much harder to change because I couldn’t retain the format that the other manufacturers had,” said Josephson. “I’d have to reformat everything and it’d take a lot longer.”

In order to solve his document editing problems, Josephson searched online and stumbled across PDFfiller — “I tried it and it worked great,” he said.

The Solution

Ross Josephson found a simple solution for a simple problem: “I had a need to edit PDFs” — he found PDFfiller and now, it “allows me to manipulate the PDFs and blend products from different manufacturers into one quote,” he said.

The process is easy. Josephson can upload his documents to PDFfiller. From there, in just a few clicks, he can make forms fillable or use PDFfiller’s powerful editing tools to erase figures, highlight phrases, and add text, watermarks and custom branding, making his estimates come out looking professional.

“I can remove [text] or if I’m adding labor to something and I want to make a nice bundle presentation on a quote… I can add them in with PDFfiller. I can take that proposal and manipulate it… We can [even] watermark them,” Josephson said. “Everything we send out of here is a PDF,” said Josephson, so it’s important that he retains the ability to edit while preserving formatting and keeping his documents looking professional.

Now Josephson is using PDFfiller up to twice a day. And “when we use it it makes a huge difference,” he said.

It is saving a “dramatic” amount of time, Josephson claimed – “It’s a great time saving tool for me.” PDFfiller is “very easy [to use],” and, because it’s online rather than installed on your computer, you can edit, send, and sign documents from anywhere and at anytime. PDFfiller is helping Josephson save “time and [improve] presentation quality.”

PDFfiller also allows Josephson to store all his quotes in the cloud, meaning that whenever he needs to access or update an old quote it’s available, anywhere, anytime, and from any internet-connected device.

Conclusion

With its comprehensive feature-set, from powerful document editing tools to e-signatures and electronic document completion, PDFfiller is the most complete and easy-to-use document management service. Josephson has made it an integral part of his workflow and in doing so, has cut the time it takes to edit and send documents.”I think it’s a great product,” he said.

For the complete paper, click on the link below: