Printed forms
The invoice, the cheque and the purchase order as they leave the building — and changing the layout without a support ticket.
Every ERP prints an invoice, and every one of them gets the same complaint: the layout is wrong for this company, and changing it is a support ticket. In TRANXACT the layout is a record, edited in a drag-and-drop designer, and the change every company makes is made once by that company.
The designer
- Drag fields, text, lines, boxes, images and the line-item table onto the page and position them.
- Positions are in millimetres, not pixels, because the output is paper. A logo 20mm from the top is 20mm from the top on every printer.
- A form has three kinds of page — first, continuation and last — so a covering page, a repeated header and a totals block that only appears at the end are a layout, not a special case in code.
- Preview renders the real PDF with real data before you commit to it.
- Printed Forms opens on a tile per document — invoice, purchase order, cheque and so on — with how many templates it has. Press one to see its templates.
Printing one
A document’s print action offers the templates defined for its type. Your default printer comes from your own preferences, and the printer list is ordinary configuration an administrator maintains — adding one is a configuration entry, not a release.
State Bank of India cheques
Two cheque templates are laid out for the State Bank of India CTS-2010 cheque leaf, so a supplier payment prints straight onto the bank’s own stationery:
| Template | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Cheque — SBI CTS-2010 | An ordinary cheque. |
| Cheque — SBI CTS-2010, A/c Payee | The same cheque crossed "A/c Payee" in the top-left corner, so it can be paid only into the payee’s own account. |
- The page is the leaf itself: 202 × 92 mm.
- The date is printed one digit to a box, DDMMYYYY, as the leaf expects.
- The amount in words counts in lakh and crore, as an Indian cheque is written, and the figures go in the amount box.
Print a test on plain paper and hold it against a leaf before the first real run: printers differ by a millimetre or two, and a template copied and nudged in the designer is kept across releases.
What this does not do
Fonts are not embedded in the generated PDF. The shipped templates are therefore Latin-script; a form laid out in Arabic, Devanagari, Kannada or Tamil will not render its text correctly. The console is translated into seventeen languages, and the printed forms are not — that is a real limit, stated here rather than discovered at the printer.
Eight templates ship as a starting point — invoice, credit memo, purchase order, cheque, remittance, statement, delivery note and receipt. Copy one rather than starting from a blank page, and your copy survives the next release: shipped templates are replaced on upgrade, and yours are not.