Multi-National Invoices What do I need to do to get these going, quickly and cheaply, preferably in just ONE form ...

This is to a German company and is part of the document heading… The English literals (example Invoice Date) are fixed, the German translations are inserted at production time and require just a country name or code in the data file …

This shows the field and it’s source … … which uses Country Code to substitute from Lookup Table … and outputs In German … this entry

A change in the Country Code data in the file to IT … French (FR) page Lookup is the same as English, so doesn’t print … … looks up this instead and outputs as this In German … and outputs as this in Italian instead … while Czech (CZ) is different, so both print …

These are lookup entries for one country (DE = Germany) Other countries are similar with a different leading value (e.g. fr- for France) Your first job is to complete a literal set for the first country you want to trade with. As we have many of them, please ask or visit Customer page on our web site. Do a final QA check using a recent, good quality local invoice from that country.

… one line only for your base language, English in this case German Czech Italian English … one line only for your base language, English in this case Spanish French

These dates use the country-specific ISO Medium date style German Czech These dates use the country-specific ISO Medium date style Italian English Spanish French

… including rounding up Quantities and Amounts vary in format, depending on what country they are destined for … German FormTrap does this for you, AUTOMATICALLY, from data file fields Price (fidh_price) and Extended Price (fext_price) … Czech French … including rounding up … including rounding

Trading in China, Japan, Korea or Thailand … Different fonts usually required from European forms, no problem, just more work… Option 1, just one Asian language: Add a Chinese literal with rules on both SimSun Font Arial Font … add Chinese font dates for the same reason.

Trading in China, Japan, Korea or Thailand … Different fonts usually required from European forms, no problem, just more work… Option 2, many Asian countries: Use the FormTrap tool to convert all fonts, in seconds to (for example) SimSun, and use this form for Asian only … No rules required … Form Design Output

To complete the Invoice … From … Translate Units of Measure, Payment Terms, other data, other codes … Looked-up Product Names … even in English. To … In 40 years and without fail, I’ve seen product names abbreviated to the point NO ONE understands them

To complete the Invoice … FormTrap has an optional procedure that updates lookup entries from a web site, run externally from FormTrap, on a timer. This is the Exchange Rate entry for Euro to Danish Krone updated for Euro trade with Denmark ... … selectively printed on invoices, only when required.

Take-aways REGARDLESS of how ancient your system is, and that it operates in just ONE language, just the country or country code in output is required … Set up your first alternate country, then you KNOW it’s going to work for the next, and do the following country very simply via Lookups rather than form design ONE FORM for all Western languages with ISO conventions for each country applied One additional form for Asian (double-byte) languages, less than one minute to swap fonts from the above, ISO conventions still applied Archive a “MY LANGUAGE COPY” in addition to the other language, automatically Do EVERYTHING, rather than a half-assed effort which leaves residual elements (like Payment Terms) in your base language which are NOT UNDERSTOOD

Sales@FormTrap.com Support@FormTrap.com +61 2 8303 2400 Thank you for watching … Questions welcomed … Sales@FormTrap.com Support@FormTrap.com +61 2 8303 2400