A one-person office stack
- Writer for quotes on letterhead (real styles, not spaces).
- Spreadsheets for inventory and a simple invoice register.
- Presentation for a 10-slide pitch you can email as PPTX and PDF.
- PDF to flatten the signed version so prices cannot “ drift.”
- Phone app to photograph delivery notes. OCR if the stack is weekly — that is Premium territory.
Invoices without becoming an accountant app
Kingsoft markets invoice-style spreadsheet tools. You can also keep a dated XLSX with invoice number, client, amount, VAT, paid/unpaid. Export each invoice to PDF. Do not host customer addresses in a random online converter. Local WPS plus a Drive/Dropbox folder you control is the adult version of “free PDF magic.”
Contracts and signatures
A PNG of your name is not automatically a qualified electronic signature in your country. For a landlord form it may be enough. For employment or regulated work, ask counsel. WPS can place a signature; the other party has to accept it. Keep the unmodified original PDF beside the signed copy.
When Premium is the cheaper Acrobat
If you merge, OCR, or batch-convert PDFs every week, reviewers consistently say the ~$30/year personal plan is the moment WPS beats a second Adobe seat. If you hit that wall once a year, stay free and suffer one afternoon. Details: free vs Premium and Mateo’s shop story.
When you should still buy Microsoft 365
- Clients live in Teams and send you SharePoint links all day.
- Your bookkeeper’s Excel file is a VBA creature.
- You need a company domain mailbox with admin, not a personal Gmail.
WPS can sit beside 365 as the PDF and lightweight laptop tool. That mixed setup is common and sane. See the comparison.
Backup like a grown-up
Turn on WPS auto backup. Also copy the month’s invoices to a disk that is not the laptop. Cloud quotas fill with photographed PDFs. Recovery guide is for the day the coffee wins.
Staff laptops
Install from wps.com or the Microsoft Store, not from a USB a cousin formatted in 2019. Personal Premium is not a 12-seat company license. Ask Kingsoft for business SKUs if this is more than a household.
AI in a shop context
WPS AI can draft a polite chaser email. It can also invent a discount you never offered. Keep numbers in the spreadsheet; let the model write the adjectives, then delete the adjectives.
Quotes that do not drift
Number the quote, freeze it as PDF, keep the XLSX as the working file. If a client asks for an editable DOCX, send it and expect the price to change — that is a business decision, not a software one. Word to PDF.
Delivery photos
Shoot, crop, arrow the damage, paste into the PDF or a Writer note. WPS Photo. OCR the packing slip if this is weekly work.
When a client lives in Google
You can still author in WPS and upload a DOCX to Drive. Or work in Docs and download DOCX for a print shop that wants Word. Do not run Dropbox plus Drive plus WPS Cloud on the same invoices folder. Drive apps.