What to put on a fax cover sheet
The details that matter are the ones a stranger at the receiving end needs: the recipient's name and department, their fax number, your name, your fax and phone number, the date and the total page count. The page count is the most useful line on the sheet, because a fax that jams or drops a page in the middle looks complete to the person holding it; if the sheet says 6 pages and only 5 arrived, they know to call you. A short subject helps the reader sort the fax without reading it. Keep comments brief and practical, for example the deadline for a reply or the name of the person who asked for the documents. Empty fields print as blank lines, so you can also make a stack of sheets and fill them in by hand.
Which template to use
The business template suits most company faxes: your logo or company name at the top, a clean table of details, and a line asking the reader to call if pages are missing. The confidential template adds a solid black banner that is hard to miss on a shared machine and a notice asking anyone who receives it by mistake to tell you and destroy the pages. The medical office template is for clinics, pharmacies, laboratories and insurers that still send referrals and records by fax; it carries a health-information banner and a privacy notice. The personal template drops the company fields for a single fax from home, such as a form for a bank or a school. The formal template follows the boxed style of official correspondence in the Gulf, with a reference number, a signature box and a stamp box.
Medical and confidential faxes: what a notice can and cannot do
A confidentiality notice tells an accidental reader what you expect of them; it does not lock the content, and printing one does not make a fax meet any privacy law or professional rule. What protects patients and clients is what you do around it. Confirm the fax number before you send, and call ahead when the documents are sensitive so someone is waiting at the machine. Keep names, diagnoses and account numbers off the cover sheet itself, because the cover is the page most likely to be seen by other people. Send only the pages that are needed. If your organisation has its own fax policy or approved wording, paste that wording into the notice box and it will replace ours.
Arabic and bilingual cover sheets
Faxes to ministries, courts, embassies and large companies in the Gulf are often expected in Arabic, or in Arabic and English together. Choose Arabic and the whole sheet is laid out right to left, with labels such as إلى and من on the right and the tick boxes in Arabic order; choose both languages and each label carries its English and Arabic name. Arabic text is drawn by your browser with proper joined letters, so it prints correctly on any machine, and you can mix Arabic and English in the same field. Fax numbers and dates are written with Western digits, which every fax operator can read. The Word download keeps the same right-to-left layout so a secretary can edit it later.
Sending the fax, and keeping your details private
Put the printed cover sheet on top of your document in the fax machine, or, if you fax from a computer or an online fax service, place the PDF before your other pages. Our PDF to fax tool can take this cover sheet and your document together and turn both into one black and white file at fax resolution, with the page count and an estimate of the sending time. Fax machines print in black and white, so colour logos arrive as grey dots; a simple dark logo works best. Everything you type stays in this browser tab and the files are made on your device. If you tick the option to remember the sender details, they are kept only in this browser so the next sheet takes seconds.