...Square can help! I don’t know why I didn’t figure this out sooner, but I had an “ah-ha” moment today and wanted to share in case it helps someone else. Here was my situation: last week I started working with a vendor who needed some business documents competed. I usually just email completed pdf files but for some reason this vendor wasn’t receiving my attachments. So they did an “old school” move and requested I FAX them. Really, I thought, in this age of TikToking, do people still fax? Well I don’t have a fax machine, can’t fax through my email program, couldn’t find a free fax app, and didn’t want to pay to have one sent. I finally got the vendor to agree to let me snail-mail a copy and I thought the issue was settled. (Hey, are you tired yet? Yeah, me too so imagine my frustration when this wasn’t the end of the story...UGH)
So this week the vendor insisted to have the file immediately, so I revisited the fax situation, considered trying the email thing again...and luckily, inspiration struck courtesy of Square! So here’s the beautiful hack in using Square to pseudo-fax...
From my Square Dashboard I opened my Website to create a new page. I was thinking I could try to temporarily make a new page, adding an image pic of the file I was needing to fax, and then email the URL of this temp page to my new vendor so they could see/print the document on their end.
If you do this, be sure to deselect the “add to navigation” checkbox, otherwise your customers will see this page in your navigation menu. If this worked, I could delete the temp web page and my customers would be none the wiser 😉
Well it worked even better than I had hoped. When I created a new temp web page, I saw an option for adding a file (.pdf) to the page.
I selected the document in question, and in amazement saw Square added my document including a download button.
That was all I needed; I copied the direct URL for this new temp page, published my website, and pasted the direct URL in an email to my vendor. Crossing my fingers, I waited for confirmation...and, it WORKED. Ta-Da! My vendor was able to see/download the needed document and I immediately went back into my Square Dashboard to edit my website, delete that page, and republish. NOTE: if you want added security, you can password-protect this page to prevent unintentional viewing; I left this off because I didn’t want another hurdle to get in the way of my vendor getting my file, but I deleted the page after the task was complete.
It might not have been as quick as pressing SEND on a fax machine, but considering I didn’t have one of those, I thought this was a pretty neat hack that solved a solution without costing anything extra. Hopefully it might help someone else in a similar predicament. Please let me know if you have any questions, suggestions...OR if you happen to know an easy, free fax tool that I SHOULDA, COULDA used, please let me know. Thanks for reading!
