The single design restriction placed on you is that you can only use the fields (information) that Match-IT makes available to List & Label.  However, a very large number of such fields are available, including all the ones you are most likely to need.  Beyond this, you can produce anything that List & Label is capable of.  However, there are a few general points to note:

•An early decision you will have to make for each document type is whether you want it printed in portrait (top along the short side of the page) or landscape (top along the long side) orientation.  Portrait has the advantage that more lines of detail can be printed before the document runs to more than one page.  With landscape orientation the extra page width allows you to accommodate more columns of information in the detail section.  While the choice is entirely yours, it is suggested that many businesses now find that landscape orientation works best for the majority of their documents.

•Most of your business documents will consist of a header area (who the document is to, when it was created, its identifying number, etc.) followed by some lines of detail (typically the parts being quoted, ordered, dispatched, invoiced, etc.).  It’s much easier to design your papers if you keep the header information vertically separated from the detail information.

•Match-IT provides a large number of fields (places to hold your business information), the detailed use of which is often up to you; this applies particularly to notes.  When deciding what sort of information you are going to put in each of these fields, you should always be mindful of whether you will want to print it in any of your business documents.  In particular, you should avoid mixing ‘internal’ information (intended only for use within your company) and ‘external’ information (intended for your customers or suppliers) in the same field.

Creating and refining your designs can be quite time-consuming.  If you intend to have more than one version of each type of business document (foreign language version(s) of documents you send to your customers, for example), you will minimise the time it takes if you get your ‘master’ version of each document type right before creating variants and derivatives based on that master.  This is because you can use the master version as a basis for each variant; this will be much quicker than starting each one from scratch.