MONEY SAVING TIPS FOR SMALL BUSINESSES - Tip 5: Cut Overnight Shipping Costs with PDF Email Attachments

If you spend a lot of money every month sending documents via overnight delivery services, here’s a great cost cutting idea:

Convert your documents into the PDF files, and send them via email attachment to your recipient. Your recipient will get it in seconds, and it won’t cost you a cent!

The idea here is that you have a document that you want to get to somebody over night. Chances are excellent that your recipient has an email address and a decent printer in their office. You can email them your document as an attachment to an email, and they can view it and print it out if necessary. Their print quality will probably be just as good as anything you print out and send them.

The trick is that they need to be able to view it and print it, and maybe they don’t have the same software you used to create it, or maybe you only have hard copy of the document.

That’s where PDF comes in. PDF stands for “Portable Document Format.” PDF is a file format that virtually everyone with a computer (Mac or PC, regardless of operating system) can could view and print. The format was invented by a company called Adobe® Systems Incorporated. Adobe gives away free software, Adobe® Acrobat® Reader, which everyone with an Internet connection has probably already installed. If not, then they can download it for free.

The trick is to convert your document to PDF so that you can send it, and they can view it and print it.

There are essentially two ways to do this; one way if you have the document already in your computer, as, for example, a Microsoft Word document, and another way if you only have hard copy of the document. Either way, you need special software to create the PDF.

If you have the document already in your computer, you will have to purchase a software program which, when installed, lets you “print” your document to a virtual PDF printer, with the result that you end up with a copy of your document in PDF format.

If you only have hard copy of the document, you will need to scan it into your computer so that you can convert it. If you bought your scanner recently, there is a good chance it will create a PDF version of your scanned document automatically. If not, you will need Adobe Acrobat Standard installed on your computer. You can then print the scanned document image to the PDF printer, as described in the previous scanner.

Once you have a copy of your document in PDF format, all you have to do is create an email to your recipient, and send the PDF document as an attachment.

The bad news is that it will cost you some money to purchase the software that creates the PDF files. You can find software on the Internet for less than $50 or you can buy a copy of Standard Adobe. Go to Adobe and try their free trial version of Adobe Acrobat. Regardless, if you do a lot of overnight shipping, this software investment will pay for itself in no time.

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