Advanced PDFs Don’t Have to be THIS Hard
Kristen Barrera – ERP Consultant, Keystone Business Services
Have you been emotionally damaged by advanced PDFs and wondered if you were eligible for financial compensation? All jokes aside, if you have ever worked with advanced PDFs, upon opening and first customizing, you know how intimidating and daunting they can be. Every business utilizes PDF templates for sales orders, invoices, bills, picking tickets, etc, so it’s a necessary evil. I’m going to provide some tips and tricks to help guide you through the Advanced PDF Adventure!
Tip #1: Resizing a logo on an invoice
Each Advanced PDF template is formatted differently depending on the record that it is referencing. There are times when the logo can take up half a page or can barely be seen depending on the template. When a customer looks at an invoice, it’s important that they see who they are receiving it from. The logo is too small in my example, so I will show you how to make it bigger.
a. Go to Customization > Advanced PDF/HTML Templates > look for “Standard Invoice” and click “customize”. NS natively creates a new PDF template from the “Standard Invoice”, so make sure to update the name so you can differentiate it.
i. Click “Template Setup”, I am using “KB – Custom Invoice PDF/HTML Template”
ii. Click “Save”
b. Click the Image and adjust the width and height. I am adjusting it to 75px to make it slightly larger than the standard logo size. Each logo is different, so you may need to increase or decrease the pixel size
c. To see these changes on the invoice, make sure it is using the new custom template that was created. Go to the invoice > Customize (upper righthand corner) > Customize Form
i. Switch the Print Template and Email Template to the new templates, then click “save”
d. To view the updated logo on the individual invoice, go back to the invoice and click the print button. Here you will see the updated logo changes
Tip #2: Changing Information in Table
Each advanced PDF has its own information that gets automatically populated in a table. Not all the information may be relevant to every business, so it’s important to update it when possible. I’ll show you how to replace fields in the template below.
a. In this example, let’s say that you would like to replace the “rate” column with the “description” of an item.
a. To do so, we will need to go to the source code of the Advanced PDF. This will open the code to the template
b. Scroll down until you find “${Item.rate@label}” and “${item.rate}”
c. Here we will update the description by changing it to “${item.description@label}” and “${item.description}”
d. **Explanation:
i. The ${ } means that NetSuite is referencing a field in the record
ii. The @label means that NetSuite is looking for the label of a field in the record
iii. By using the format of item.description, it tells NetSuite that you are looking at the item subtab of the record and specifying which field you want to see on the pdf
e. Click “save” on the Advanced PDF Template
f. Go back to the invoice and click print, you will see the rate field is now replaced with the description
Congratulations! You made it to the end of the advanced PDF adventure! Now, you should be able to adjust the logo and fields in an invoice now. While this demonstration focused on invoices, these tips can also be used on other record types as well. Feel free to continue the adventure in other records and adjust as need be. Good luck!
Keystone. Your NetSuite solution provider and integration partner.
Call – 866-546-7227 | Email – info@kbscloud.net
About Kristen Barrera
Kristen is one of Keystone Business Services talented ERP Consultants. She has experience working with client-desired Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions in the specific verticals of wholesale and distribution, advertising, retail and nonprofits. Specific projects including working with data migration, specialized configurations, advanced pdfs, and more. Kristen brings strong interpersonal, problem solving and relationship building skills.
Kristen graduated from Texas State University – San Marcos, Texas, with a Bachelor of Business Administration – BBA, Marketing. Kristen currently resides in Austin, Texas where she enjoys hiking, trying new restaurants and exploring the city any chance she can.
