SANFACE Software logo

The Department of Planning, Design & Construction (PDC) at Cornell University project

We were looking for a way to avoid having to handle and store the "Office Copy" of invoices produced by our cost accounting system. We generate about 2,600 invoices per month, each one has anywhere from 2 - 30 pages. We needed a quasi unalterable copy for record retention and audit purposes.

We were also looking for away to leverage technology to make the office copy available on line to avoid having to walk down the hall to get a copy when trying to resolve a customer inquiry. We wanted the account representatives to have an exact copy of what the customer was looking at when they called.

txt2pdf PRO filled the bill. Each month, we generate two text files for each invoice. One is a config file used by txt2PDF Pro, the other the text file with the invoice data. We also create a bat file used to do a batch create of the PDF documents and to create entries in an Oracle database allowing us to search and retrieve the PDF documents.

The whole thing runs start to finish each month in about 20 minutes in the middle of the night and is available to our account reps via a web interface by the time they get into work the next morning and days before our customers get the hard copy. It is a hit.

Why txt2pdf PRO?
We were headed down a path of creating program code that would create individual postscript files that would have to be run through Acrobat Distiller. It is difficult code to write and maintain. This equals expensive. Also, it is a process that does not lend itself well to automation and would not allow us to fill in the document info such as keywords, title, etc.

We found out about txt2pdf PRO midway through the process. We had three programmer weeks into the program that was to create the postscript files and it still was not working properly. We had a real deadline to get it done. We were able to reuse some of that code to create a program that makes the config and text files for txt2pdf PRO. The project was complete that week and went onto production with a few days to spare.

Here you can find an example of our invoices, now in PDF!

Read the other projects

The Department of Planning, Design & Construction (PDC) at Cornell University