French invoices

No, that's not a euphemism.

While spending rather too long looking through old shop ephemera online, I came across a collection of French invoices. And they are beautiful. Ornate letterheads. Carefully set type. Fine rules and flourishes. Addresses given almost as much prominence as the name above the door. Some restrained, others wonderfully elaborate. All lavishing an extraordinary amount of attention on a piece of paper whose principal purpose is to tell somebody how much money they owe.

There is something rather lovely about that. Because the invoice is an unusual moment in the relationship between a business and its customer. We know exactly where our eye goes first.

The total.

Perhaps there's a sharp intake of breath. Perhaps relief. Perhaps a quick mental calculation followed by the suspicion that we really did order more wine than we remember.

But look beyond the figure and an invoice can tell you quite a lot about the business that sent it.

The paperwork has a personality

These old invoices weren't separate from the identity of the shop. They were part of it.The typography, language, paper, printer's marks and arrangement of information all communicated something about the establishment behind them.

A grand merchant could look grand. A practical supplier could be matter-of-fact. A fashionable shop could demonstrate its taste before you'd even examined what it was charging you for.

Even the final figure could be treated differently – announced confidently, tucked neatly into a corner or carefully integrated into the rest of the page.

The administration had a personality.

The last thing you send

We put considerable thought into beginnings. The shopfront. The website. The packaging. The welcome email. The first impression. Then, somewhere towards the end of the transaction, the visual standards can rather abruptly disappear.

A beautiful project is followed by a default accounting template.

A carefully wrapped order by an automated receipt.

A lovely restaurant meal by a bill that appears to have been printed by a municipal car park.

Understandably so. Invoices have a job to do. They need to be accurate, legible and compliant before they need to be charming.

But that doesn't mean they have to be entirely devoid of character.

The invoice is, after all, often one of the last things a customer receives from you.

Why should the experience stop just before it arrives?

The overlooked bits

There is a broader point here about the unglamorous edges of a business.

Invoices. Receipts. Order confirmations. Delivery notes. Returns slips. Email signatures. Labels on parcels.

Nobody starts a business because they have always dreamt of designing a particularly good credit note.

Yet these small pieces accumulate.

Together, they form part of the impression a business leaves behind.

The old French shopkeepers seem to have understood this rather well.

If a piece of paper was going to carry their name, it might as well carry it properly.

Perhaps that's worth borrowing.

Not the flourishes, necessarily.

Just the care.

If you have to send an invoice, you might as well make it a pleasure to receive.

Or at least as pleasurable as an invoice can reasonably be.