When viewing email attachments, there is no way back to the program

Sending emails without the relevant content is not common

  • By far the majority of my suppliers send out an email with the invoice attached as a pdf.
  • A couple of on line suppliers have the invoice as part of the email (inline)
  • A link to a portal to download the invoice is used by Zero but is otherwise very rare in my experience and offers a worse customer experience for my use case (my customers and employees would gain zero from a portal and it is extremely rare for me to have anything to gain from look at any of my suppliers portal).

For my use case I have no need for internet access to my accounting program. In fact I actively prevent internet access it as doing so increases my IT security by decreasing the exposure surface.

If Manager lost the ability to produce a complete email and required a portal for email content. For me, that would mean the cost of my accounting system emailing payslips, was exposure of my accounting program to unrestricted internet access. It adds the disadvantage of all other online accounting products, raising security hardening and testing issues for Manager. Resulting in a massive increase in exposure surface just to email payslips. Doing so is a dramatic retrograde change, dramatically decreasing the competitiveness of the Manager product .

Why not develop something that would convert the document as an image with predefined page breaks in the View screen as per paper size and then save the image as pdf.
This would solve the need to support different languages and retain the advantages of in-built pdf capability.
@lubos

I agree. I don’t really like Xero’s approach either. So much malware is distributed via links in emails, that I really don’t want a solution that uses a link to connect to the invoice. However, I have more than one supplier that does that and I will concede it works without having to worry about sending attachments or logging into a portal or anything.

Not an ideal solution, but certainly a workable one.

Maybe Sharptek’s solution might work by creating standard preset templates for emailing invoices and payslips thus retaining the use of the built in program and eliminate the issues with the pdf creator which are the reasons he wants to get rid of the addon in the first place.

As I say, it is up to the developer how he wants to handle this. I would recommend a one unified system approach to emailing pdf’s, displaying and downloading on the portals (when they are finally ready) etc.

Anyway, I don’t want to recommend any particular solution as I don’t have a solution. Just registering my opposition to the use of email attachments other than pdfs.

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My understanding of the problem with that logic is

  1. Generation of the page bit page image is done by using a virtual printer driver which outputs an image.

  2. Generation of a pdf pages is done by using a virtual printer driver which outputs pdf.

  3. If you have a virtual printer driver working in Manager which outputs a bitmaped image it is likely also to support pdf output.

So I suspect it doesn’t simply the task. I do however support your logic endeavouring to define what is the actual core functional requirement.

Xero doesn’t support non-English characters. PDFs will come out broken. This is exactly why I consider internal PDF generator obsolete, looking for solution to support all languages equally. Xero is English only.

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well I also want PDF attachment as the format when sending invoice, not the link and that choice is not available to select any more

@ranga read post#11 above.