A project coordinator cut expense packet prep from 15 minutes to 5

The invoice is a spreadsheet. The receipts are photographs. Nothing in the pile is the same format as anything else in the pile, and accounts payable wants one file.

The chain took about 15 minutes a packet 6 months ago. On a 5-packet day, it could eat almost 2 hours, and the alternative on the table was not assembling the packet at all.

• Nothing arrives in the same format. A spreadsheet invoice and a stack of receipt photographs, and accounts payable wants one document.
• Receipt photos are heavy. Pictures taken on a phone push the packet over the size the system will accept.
• Adobe was out of reach. The full package was tied to a different role, Adobe Express was more than she needed, and the internal request was going nowhere.

Most of the work in a packet is not the packet. It is getting a spreadsheet and a folder of phone photos into the same format before anything can be merged at all. pdf.net takes them as they arrive: one upload, converted and merged in the same pass.

• Drop the whole pile in at once. Spreadsheets, photos, and PDFs go in together, in one upload, instead of one file at a time.
• Everything becomes a PDF on the way in. No converting each file by hand before you can do anything with it.
• Merge in the same pass. The upload and the merge are one action, not 2 tools and a download in between.
• Then tidy and shrink. Drop the pages that don’t belong, rotate what came in sideways, and compress what is left.

A finished packet takes about 5 minutes instead of 15, so a 5-packet day is down from almost 2 hours to about 30 minutes.