Carbonless Forms

You’ve probably written or received an email with a “CC” that showed all the other recipients of the email. That “CC” stands for “Carbon Copy”, and it refers to an old way of creating duplicates on invoices or other financial and business related documents. When you wanted multiple people to receive a copy of such a document, you’d put a carbon sheet between two pieces of paper; when your pencil was applied to the first sheet, the pressure on the carbon sheet would make similar markings on the second sheet. Given that these sheets would be distributed to multiple people, you would mark who the carbon copies were going to: “CC”. In e-mail etiquette, people in the “To” field are expected to take action, while people in the “CC” field simply have it for their reference.

Nowadays, carbon paper is rarely used to for invoices, contract, and the like; instead, a form of carbonless copy paper is used, named so because the carbon sheets between pages are no longer necessary. Instead, the back of the first sheet has microencapsulated ink in it; the top of the second sheet has a super-reactive clay that makes marks when the ink capsules are ruptured by the pressure of the pen. This form of carbonless paper was invented by National Cash Register; as a result, it’s often given the name “No Carbon Required”, a nod to NCR’s common name. If you ever hear your print shop talking about NCR paper, now you know what it means!

NCR forms are incredibly useful to businesses, in part because of their customizability. You can probably think of a plethora of ways copying text from paper to paper is useful; basically anytime multiple people are getting a copy of a statement, you want NCR forms. You can print them in black and white, or you can print them in colour. Companies will often use a combination of the two, using bright, coloured inks to make the logo stand out, and perhaps using red or other noticeable inks to make a particularly important field, like the signature or grand total box, stand out. NCR forms also come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes; you can get smaller invoice forms in order to save money, and you can get the forms bound, padded or loose.

All kinds of customization can be done with NCR forms; like with all kinds of printing, your imagination is the limit. Just because they’re usually used for invoices, doesn’t mean they have to look boring! Common practice is to number your NCR forms for ease of record keeping; just ask and we can do this for you without any hassle. The Winnipeg printing company you trust will be able to handle all types of printing requests, from the day to day workhorse NCR forms to the brilliant, once a year promotional billboards you want to put up. Getting to know your print shop is a great idea, because they’ll gain an understanding of what your company’s branding is. That will give them the ability to suggest changes to your printing process so that you have the most efficient, aesthetic documents possible.