HACKER Q&A
📣 andrei_says_

Please make your SASS' invoices filenames human-friendly


I have a favor to ask.

Please make your SASS' invoices filenames human-friendly and save your clients hours of frustrating, menial, error-prone work.

Every month I and countless other paying customers of yours have to download your invoice and have it processed with my company's accounting.

I need to do this for 5-10 SAAS services every month.

Most of these files are named completely randomly, often like this (ex. - 'Browserstack: Invoice-8a28fd166d2cace7016d34cbe6f06e11-20190915.pdf') or just the word "invoice", or just a hash, or sometimes, the invoice date but no company name. Some don't even allow a downlnoad so I have to save the screen as PDF myself.

Here's what would make mine and many, many others' lives easier and happier:

Use a filename like this:

saas_name--date_of_invoice--amount_of_invoice.pdf

This is what my accounting dept is asking for and is a major PIA.

It is trivial to automate and would make me and countless other paying customers delighted by the thoughtfulness and care of your company much much more than any PR initiative you can think of.

Please, please bring this up to the decision-makers in your company.


  👤 Blakestr Accepted Answer ✓
There's no way to pull the data out of the image, even if it is a raw scan, wouldn't there be some OCR function that exists? Honestly I'm a bit surprised there's nothing that has solved this problem.

You would need a template for each customer on where in the file the data exists. Error checking would be an issue but you could bypass that a bit by using the same information and generating a receipt to the user. You could also have filters in place that would require a human to intervene if the amounts are too high case something goes wrong.

I get that you're not asking for an app idea or anything but I'm surprised there's not some solution you can use that already exists.