Making Office Forms Function Better for You
Office forms aren’t the most exciting part of running a business, but it’s important to have them handy. Clearly designed forms can make life a little easier for you and your employees.
There are plenty of places on the Web where you can download forms that you can print out or fill out via a word processing program. Officedepot.com and Entrepreneur Magazine (https://www.entrepreneurmag.com/formnet), for example, offer forms that you can download and fill out offline.
Formsplanet.com has a more interesting approach. Instead of just letting you download forms, this site serves as an application service provider, offering forms that you can customize and fill out directly from its Web site.
The site is aimed at small businesses, including home offices and self-employed professionals who might not otherwise have the budget to design and print customized forms. It’s also handy for anyone who needs to fill out expense reports and other forms while on the road.
For example, the site’s “form shop” offers three types of expense reports, all of which can be printed out and filled in by hand or filled in via computer directly from the Web site. If you choose to fill it out online, you can save a form as a work in progress and work on it later.
It’s not a bad way for traveling employees or business owners to keep track of expenses on a daily basis and then be able to submit the report at the end of the trip. For security reasons, you must provide a user name and password each time you enter your forms area.
What I like about the expense reports is that they provide optional formats. Many expense report forms are designed specifically for travel and make it very difficult to report other types of expenses such as the purchase of office supplies.
You also have a choice of invoice forms. Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but the cash flow from my freelance writing business would be a lot better if I were more prompt in submitting invoices. Formsplanet.com won’t fill them out for me, but it does make it a lot easier. The site offers a products invoice and invoices designed for those of us in the service business. As with the expense reports, the invoice forms are very easy to fill out, and they have built-in math functions so the Web site--not you--figures out the totals.
Other forms include fax cover pages and interoffice memos, meeting agendas, employee management tools, purchase orders and more. The site plans to add new forms, including some designed for specific types of businesses such as law, real estate and construction.
The site lets you customize the forms with your own logo. You can import a graphic from your hard drive that will be included on all the forms you create. You can also add the usual contact information, and you can make some modifications to the text of the forms themselves.
Even though Formsplanet is a Web site, it requires software that it downloads for you automatically. That software currently works only on Windows systems and with Internet Explorer 4.0 and above. The company is currently working on a version for Netscape but has no immediate plans for a Macintosh version.
The site will remain free for at least three more months. The company plans to start charging $45.95 a year per user or $5.95 a month, but until then, you may as well try it out for free.
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Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 1:48 p.m. weekdays on KNX (1070). He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com.
