Doing Micro Business with PDFs
So much business these days is transacted in the portable document format (PDF), whether you are David or Goliath. However not every PDF solution has to have the big price tag of an Adobe subscription. The purpose of this blog is to help micro businesses navigate the best dollar-for-dollar value when it comes to PDF solutions. Small businesses can also learn, this is a non-discriminatory blog.
Adobe, the Big Bad Brother
Adobe Systems, the company that created the portable document format, had semi humble beginnings, started in a garage in Silicon Valley, but then quickly traded humble for rich and then from rich to bully. Acrobat is the best PDF editor on the market, and Adobe knows it, and they flex it, despite their own screw-ups.
But we can’t talk about PDF without talking about Adobe Acrobat, and this begs the question: to pay for Acrobat or not? This leads to other questions: can you transact business without editing PDFs? Can you transact business with less expensive or free solutions?
The ROI of PDF
If you can’t transact business without creating or editing PDFs, then it doesn’t matter how much it costs (within the realm of an Acrobat Pro subscription or less). An Acrobat Pro subscription is $20 a month, $22 per person if you sign up as a team, probably half the cost of your cell phone plan. Could you operate your business without a cellphone? No! So let’s do ROI math.
ROI is the time it takes to recover the cost of the investment. So you invest $100,000 in a franchise business and the business takes 5 years to pay you back, 20K a year, that is a five years ROI. This might also be considered 20% interest, as if you put $100,000 in the bank and every year you got 20,000 in interest.
Some of my customers see a return on their Acrobat investment in one transaction or 1 hour of time. A 1 hour ROI, 80,000% interest. The math gets really weird here, but the point is, the most expensive possible cost of PDF editing is minuscule to the ROI almost any business will see.
Less or Free
$22 per person per month is the most that you are going to pay for PDF editing, but maybe you don’t need Acrobat Pro. Here are some less expensive ways to transact business in PDF:
Instead of subscribing to Acrobat Pro, subscribe to Acrobat Standard, it is less expensive and the main thing it doesn’t do is redacting.
Instead of subscribing to Acrobat, buy the one-time license, it costs about the same as two years of subscription, but you only pay once. Two year ROI.
Buy a different PDF Editor such as Nitro or Foxit. Again, about half the cost and full featured. I use Foxit, and I never feel like I wish I used Acrobat.
Your office productivity tool, Office 365 or Google Workspace, can easily create PDF’s from whatever document you are creating at no additional charge. You don’t need to edit the PDF if you are the original document creator.
Use the free features of Acrobat Reader to do things like signing a document or annotating. Look for these icons in Reader, they do free stuff:
A Word About Signing PDF’s
I think this will turn into a full blog for next week, but I want to mention it briefly here. There are several levels of signing and related proof of identity. In Acrobat Reader you can easily sign almost any PDF as if it were paper. Click the pen icon shown above to add a signature, initials, text for printed name and date, etc. Then click File -> Save As to finalize your executed document.
Conclusion
When I set out to write this blog, I thought it was going to be way more arduous, but putting it down in black and white suggests otherwise. Sometimes it just makes sense to pay Adobe for their amazing product, but there are plenty of options out there for the micro businesses who are watching every penny.