Online Invoicing

14:35.01 - Thursday 23rd September 2004   (Link to This Entry)

I spent the morning finishing off an online invoicing system for a website I've been doing on and off for a year. The owner is selling stuff via the site and needed staff to be able to knock up invoices independent of each other, so we moved the whole idea online.

There's a list of items available which is available for purchase online already, so I added shop and distributor pricing to that and created a list of accounts. You start a new invoice, pick the recipient and add the items from a list. The page uses JavaScript to maintain the list and to generate a string which represents the cart in the format:

I:Q:P:I:Q:P:I:Q:P:

..where I is the item record number, Q is the quantity of that item and P is the agreed price. The price has to go in there because they could conceivably change, and there are three possible prices (Web/Shop/Dist). Having them in the cart makes working out the total cost a tad easier as well.

Bringing it all together, the user can view an invoice and hit 'Print' in their browser to produce a nicely-presented invoice whenever and wherever they need to. Currently it all works quite well indeed, and the owner is pleased indeed.