I'll get straight to the point; an increasing number of businesses I deal with are sending quotations and invoices via email in Microsoft Word (.docx) format. Does anyone else consider it a basic IT skill for office personnel to be capable of producing an uneditable invoice or quotation to send via email? Have these people even heard of Portable Document Format? I find it hilarious. I am actually considering knocking a zero off a recent quote and sending it back to the firm with an order confirmation, just to see what happens.
You know that a PDF file is trivially editable, right? Even when locked down with access restrictions and a viewing password, the DRM is easily bypassed - especially if you can print (thank you, operating systems with a built-in "Print to PDF" option!) Okay, so it's a little different to opening read-write in Word as the default action, but still. The real answer is contracts/invoices with cryptographic signatures; edit the file, the signature becomes invalid. I think Adobe's DRM wrapper supports that now, although you could do the same easily with PGP/GPG and a file of any format - even DocX.
E-documents certainly can stand their ground. How do you think 99% of business is transacted now ? Its a order over email and they do not have signatures on. I work for a $20bn company and have to comply with SOX and we transact 100% of our business like this.
Wait you pay invoices.... That's where I have been going wrong. Most of the stuff I see is pdf, which I consider to be uneditable enough for general use
We used to fax purchase orders over to most of our suppliers, we only moved over to PDF/email a couple of years ago..... oh the shame.
Me? I'll only pay invoices that are intricately carved into the subdermis of the rep or salesperson who is handling my purchase.
That's nothing. Until fairly recently, the only legally recognised way for solicitors to communicate electronically was by Telex
