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“Waiting to Start Report” message in your Free Purchase Order Software

We’ve had some support tickets from folks who are seeing a message like “Waiting to start report” when printing Purchase Orders or other reports to a PDF file in the free version of SpendMap, or when emailing Purchase Orders in PDF format.

We think the problem may be a result of an update to Windows 10 that Microsoft pushed out recently.

If you ever have trouble creating PDF files in your free SpendMap system, please try removing and then reinstalling SpendMap’s PDF printer driver. You will need Administrator access/rights on PC to do this…

  1. Exit SpendMap.
  2. In Windows Settings, navigate to “Devices”, then “Printers and Scanners”, and then remove the “Palmas PDF printer”.
  3. To reinstall the PDF printer driver, just RIGHT-mouse-click on the shortcut/icon that you use to run SpendMap and select “Run As Administrator”.  As you log in to SpendMap, you will see additional prompts to install the printer driver.

If you are still not able to view or email POs or other reports in PDF format, please let us know on our Support Ticket System.

Thanks and sorry for any inconvenience.

“Waiting to Start Report” message in your Free Purchase Order Software

We’ve had a few support tickets from people who are seeing a message like “Waiting to start report” when printing Purchase Orders or other reports to a PDF file in the free version of SpendMap, or when emailing POs in PDF format.

We think the problem may be a result of a big update to Windows 10 that Microsoft pushed out recently.

Either way, if you ever have trouble creating PDF files in your free SpendMap system, please try removing and then reinstalling SpendMap’s PDF printer driver (you will need Administrator access/rights on PC to do this)…

  1. Exit SpendMap.
  2. In the Windows Control Panel, navigate to “Devices and printers”, and remove the “Palmas PDF printer”.
  3. To reinstall the PDF printer driver, just RIGHT-mouse-click on the shortcut/icon that you use to run SpendMap and select “Run As Administrator”.  As you log in to SpendMap, you will see additional prompts to install the printer driver.

If you are still not able to view or email POs or other reports in PDF format, please let us know on our Support Ticket System.

Thanks, and sorry for any inconvenience.

-FP

How to Personalize the Email Messages in your Free Purchase Order Software

Peter from the United Kingdom reached out to us on Facebook to ask if he could personalize the emails that SpendMap creates when sending Purchase Orders to his suppliers…

“Is there a way to create a template email?  Also is there a way that the (PDF file name) can be defined, either to match the PO or have a prefix?”

Yes, there are settings in SpendMap to personalize the email messages, including;

  1. Adding your company name to the “From” field of the email messages,
  2. Adding any text that you want to the body of the email itself, and
  3. You can customize the filename of the PDF document (i.e. the PO itself) to show your company name (or any other prefix), as well as including the PO number in the filename.

All these options are available in the middle of the Email Settings screen, which you can find here…
– PURCHASING > Setup system > e-mail settings


The Online Help for that screen has all the details about how to use those settings, but here’s what your emails might look like, based on the settings used above…

Email Purchase Order

 

Update to Fix False Positive Virus Warning on PDF Printer Driver

maintenanceLast week a popular antivirus software system reported a “false positive” related to SpendMap’s PDF printer driver.  That is, the antivirus software reported that SpendMap may contain a virus even though it does not.

The antivirus software company promptly whitelisted SpendMap, which immediately stopped the warning message, but after analyzing the problem we decided to post an update for SpendMap anyway because we can see it happening again.  Here’s why…

The virus software didn’t report that SpendMap actually contains a virus but rather that it MAY have a virus.  It was the antivirus software’s “proactive” threat detection that for some reason didn’t like how SpendMap was invoking our PDF printer driver when previewing reports.  It saw the communication between SpendMap and the printer driver as “suspicious”, and logged it as a potential threat.  No big deal.

But since each antivirus software can deal with “potential” threats differently, we decided that it would be prudent to proactively patch SpendMap to minimize any potential inconvenience to our customers.  For example, while in this case only a warning was displayed and SpendMap kept working, had the antivirus software instead quarantined or deleted any of our systems files, that might have been much harder to recover from.

So, to keep your SpendMap system running smoothly, please use the menu Help > Check For Updates, at your earliest convenience.  This will update your system to version 14.16.11.  You can see which version you are running, using the menu Help > About in SpendMap.

After applying the update, you must run SpendMap as an Administrator on each PC so that it can install the new PDF printer driver.  To do this, simply right-mouse-click on the shortcut/icon that you use to run SpendMap, select “Run as Administrator” from the menu that is displayed, then follow the prompts to install the new printer driver.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Separate PDF files to send Purchase Orders to suppliers by e-mail

Imran works in the Engineering Services field and was asking about the best way to create PDF files of his Purchase Orders to send to his suppliers when using the free version of SpendMap.Many-POs-in-PDF

“While processing a PO, how do I print the buyer’s copy and seller’s copy separately?
…it is printing both pages together.”

Imran is printing both a “supplier’s copy” as well as an “internal copy” of his Purchase Orders, and both are ending up in a single PDF file (since both copies are in the same print job).

This would also be an issue when processing multiple POs for multiple suppliers at the same time.  For example, if you processed 5 POs in your PO Work Area for 5 separate suppliers, if you chose to print to a PDF file, you would get a single PDF file containing all 5 orders, again, since all are coming from the same print job.

If you’re printing hard copies (on paper), this doesn’t matter because you’ll just grab the pile of POs off the printer and give each one to the applicable supplier.  But if you’re printing to PDF (most likely to send to your suppliers by e-mail as Imran is trying to do), then you will end up with a single PDF with all POs in a single file, which obviously won’t work.

Solution: Use SpendMap’s Email Module to send the supplier their PDF file.

Instead of enabling multiple copies of your printed POs in PO Printing Settings, just use SpendMap’s built-in email feature to send the supplier their copy of the order.  When you process new orders, SpendMap will create a PDF copy of the PO, attach it to an e-mail message, and will send it to the supplier automatically, with no manual intervention (i.e. it all happens behind-the-scenes, so there is no need to manually create PDF files, manually create e-mail messages, and then attach the applicable PDFs to the applicable e-mails.

(more…)

PDF Printer Driver in Windows 10

If you install the free version of SpendMap on a PC with an earlier version of Windows and then later upgrade the PC to Windows 10, you may need to reinstall SpendMap’s PDF printer driver. (more…)