Fri, 2007 Nov 30
Worst. Invoices. Ever.
One of the companies I work for buys a lot of materials from CSC (in the interests of not getting in trouble, I won’t tell which CSC it is). As best I can tell their customer support is good, delivery time and materials available are fine, etc. In short, they do well with their central product. They’re not an accounting company, nor a print design group, so I don’t expect their invoices to be, well, great. But they fail to even manage “sucks utterly”. To the extent that if I was an owner instead of an employee, I’d refuse to order anything from CSC until they fix their bloody invoices. Well, probably not, but it sounds nice.
So what’s wrong with their invoices. Let’s start with the obvious. Five pages for 24 dollars. How that happens illustrates several of the other problems:
- Four lines per item. Now, this isn’t inherently bad. I’d be okay if they were four lines with a purpose. Alas, they’re a grouping of odd letters (more on item descriptions later). And they’re four big lines, so that there’s only room for about five items per page. These are not big-ticket items.
- Back-ordered items. All the items back-ordered on an order are listed on the invoice. This again is not necessarily bad, but for a combination of two reasons: the aforementioned amount of space taken by item descriptions, and that most of those back ordered items were shipped the same f—ing day.
- Massive header and footer space.
- They feel the need to use fixed-width fonts. Apparently, the invoice format was originally created for typewriters, and they’ve tried to stick as close to that as possible.
Now, then, jumping back to the description. They’re totally cryptic. Sometimes I can parse them. More often they feel like trying to read the comments on icanhas, except I don’t even have the vague hope of finding something funny. And, yet, they need four lines of text to tell me…nothing. I can’t begin to understand the reason for this. Yes, include a cryptic part number for your reference, but computers are quite capable of storing novels; readable descriptions are certainly within their grasp. And if they switched to a reasonable font, better descriptions need not eat up any more space.
Finally, what really annoys me, as I touched on earlier, is the sheer number of invoices. As best I can tell, CSC sends an invoice for every box shipped (They also send a packing slip with every box). It does not matter if they were all sent on the same day. So, combined with their listing of all back-ordered items, some days we’ve received five or more invoices, sometimes all for the same order, with the first listing every item on the order, even if it invoices the shipment of only a single item.
Anyway, just whining. No point, except to say that this would be an ideal situation for outsourcing. Let somebody else design the invoicing process, cos, CSC, what you’re doing…sucks.
