Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?
-
@garak0410 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
@StrongBad said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
You COULD make your own web reporting with it, as it is open. But that would be more of a pain. But certainly an option.
@hillel369 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
We just released a PHP SDK which would enable you to easily load their data to generate custom reports.
https://github.com/invoiceninja/sdk-php
We're also working on a marketplace which would enable you to share/sell your report with other users.
Thanks for these tips...will consider them for sure...
You will find almost no software that does what you want, like you want out of the box.
Reporting is honestly one of the "must customize" pieces of pretty much all accounting systems.
-
@hillel369 Welcome to MangoLassi.it Please make sure to request a vendor tag. You can reach out to me if you have any questions.
-
@hillel369 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
We just released a PHP SDK which would enable you to easily load their data to generate custom reports.
https://github.com/invoiceninja/sdk-php
We're also working on a marketplace which would enable you to share/sell your report with other users.
That's awesome. So glad to see Invoice Ninja jumping in here! Welcome to the community.
-
@Minion-Queen Thanks, how do I go about getting a vendor tag?
-
In the bar above go to groups (the group of people)
choose vendor
and the green box join group on the left hand side
And one of my team will approve it. That's it!
-
@hillel369 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
@Minion-Queen Thanks, how do I go about getting a vendor tag?
You have been added to the group.
-
@scottalanmiller Thanks!
-
Update...
None of the solutions we tried (Invoice Ninja or Zoho) were good enough for the office manager. So they went ahead and looked at a developer. Couldn't do it fast enough and too expensive.
So almost full circle, they've contacted the person (retired, 72 year old man) who had my job before me since his background was Microsoft Office Development (VBA) to see if he can develop this. He called me and he politely sounded disinterested and wants to call this a collaboration project. And he wants to try to do this with Microsoft Office. He is old school. So it looks like this may be in Access.
So it is more or less back in my lap. And finally, management is showing interest to send me to some classes. But not sure where to start on classes.
-
@garak0410 Sorry to hear our app didn't work for you.
If you let us know what was missing we'll try to help.
-
@garak0410 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
He is old school. So it looks like this may be in Access.
Don't use "old school" as a code name for incompetent. Using Access was just as bad twenty years ago as it is today. They wouldn't call him "old school" back then, he would have been dead weight long ago, too. Things haven't really changed. It's too common to conflate "the old way" with "being wrong", but that's not the case. It just seems old because people who try to do it today say "I used to do it that way, what's wrong with it", but that doesn't imply that it was good when they did it before, either.
-
@scottalanmiller said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
@garak0410 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
He is old school. So it looks like this may be in Access.
Don't use "old school" as a code name for incompetent. Using Access was just as bad twenty years ago as it is today. They wouldn't call him "old school" back then, he would have been dead weight long ago, too. Things haven't really changed. It's too common to conflate "the old way" with "being wrong", but that's not the case. It just seems old because people who try to do it today say "I used to do it that way, what's wrong with it", but that doesn't imply that it was good when they did it before, either.
Agreed. I am about to go talk to my direct manager to get his thoughts. We need to move forward not backward. Might finally be my leverage to get some classes under my belt or to buckle down and hit my Lynda.com and Pluralsight memberships.
-
@garak0410 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
Update...
None of the solutions we tried (Invoice Ninja or Zoho) were good enough for the office manager. So they went ahead and looked at a developer. Couldn't do it fast enough and too expensive.
So almost full circle, they've contacted the person (retired, 72 year old man) who had my job before me since his background was Microsoft Office Development (VBA) to see if he can develop this. He called me and he politely sounded disinterested and wants to call this a collaboration project. And he wants to try to do this with Microsoft Office. He is old school. So it looks like this may be in Access.
So it is more or less back in my lap. And finally, management is showing interest to send me to some classes. But not sure where to start on classes.
Did you get any specifics on why they weren't good enough. I think that may be the first part of this before going any further. From the sounds of it this was a, "I don't want to change my processes so we need to make something to fit them." Kind of thing, it would probably be cheaper to replace the office manager, I'm half joking of course, then it would be to develop software to fit this persons wants. Rarely, although sometimes, does an SMB need custom built software. Especially when invoicing and billing such such well defined standards.
-
@coliver said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
@garak0410 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
Update...
None of the solutions we tried (Invoice Ninja or Zoho) were good enough for the office manager. So they went ahead and looked at a developer. Couldn't do it fast enough and too expensive.
So almost full circle, they've contacted the person (retired, 72 year old man) who had my job before me since his background was Microsoft Office Development (VBA) to see if he can develop this. He called me and he politely sounded disinterested and wants to call this a collaboration project. And he wants to try to do this with Microsoft Office. He is old school. So it looks like this may be in Access.
So it is more or less back in my lap. And finally, management is showing interest to send me to some classes. But not sure where to start on classes.
Did you get any specifics on why they weren't good enough. I think that may be the first part of this before going any further. From the sounds of it this was a, "I don't want to change my processes so we need to make something to fit them." Kind of thing.
Below is what our office manager has sent to potential developers:
Process We Have Now
Customer calls or comes in to order components.
The salesmen at the Metal Store hand-writes a sales ticket/invoice on pre-printed, multi-copy forms.
One copy goes to the shop to produce the material.
One copy comes to me with deposit payment.
Original copy goes to the customer when the material is picked up or delivered.What we want:
What I need is an invoice/ticket system that can replace the handwritten, pre-printed forms.
We need reports that are sorted by multiple fields and can be printed daily, monthly and yearly. The main report that we use now is sorted and selected by delivery date, but that report is manually input into a spreadsheet.
Sales tax needs to be able to change “on the fly”.
The actual invoice number needs to pre-populate in sequential order.
Want to pull from the customer table in Great Plains to populate customer info in this application.
Would like a databases of material pricing.
Must be able to apply payments to the invoice/ticket (notes not actual transactions)There are 3 guys that will be using the program at the Metal Store and we would like to be able to pull reports from our office. I suppose in the future, we would love to be able to shoot the ticket over to the shop or to our office, but we are not ready to make that change right now. We are good to use hard copies.
Would eventually want estimating abilities.
-
All of that, except the Great Plains integration, is pretty standard. Great Plains, I think Microsoft has taken that over and now calls it Dynamics GP?, doesn't have any thing to do this? Again this is all pretty standard.
-
So what part of all of that is missing from the solutions that you have looked at?
-
@coliver said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
All of that, except the Great Plains integration, is pretty standard. Great Plains, I think Microsoft has taken that over and now calls it Dynamics GP?, doesn't have any thing to do this? Again this is all pretty standard.
Yeah...Dynamics GP 2015. It might have some abilities like this but we primarily use it for payroll and accounting. If it has POS abilities, we don't use it.
@scottalanmiller said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
So what part of all of that is missing from the solutions that you have looked at?
The reporting that they want.
No integration with the GP customer database.
Not enough customization to includes all fields from the current paper invoice.We were THIS close to using ZoHo Invoice but they pulled the plug because of no reporting by Delivery Date. I worked like crazy with ZoHo to configure it like we want and this one thing stopped that project.
-
@garak0410 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
@scottalanmiller said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
So what part of all of that is missing from the solutions that you have looked at?
The reporting that they want.
Then their response makes no sense. Let be rephrase it:
The car that is perfect for us doesn't have child seats in it, so we are going to look at building our own car from scratch.
What? Why not add car seats to the car, instead?
Reporting is a separate function (or can be) from the application. If you build your OWN application you have to build the app AND build the reporting. Two pieces of effort. If you use Ninja, you have the app and it is fully supported and you just have to report from it. It can do any reporting that you want, it's not report limited in some way. So while it doesn't do the reporting for you, neither does writing your own app. So just make some reports for Ninja and ta da... a better solution in a tiny fraction of the effort.
Their response to the lack of reports borders on the insane.
-
@garak0410 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
We were THIS close to using ZoHo Invoice but they pulled the plug because of no reporting by Delivery Date. I worked like crazy with ZoHo to configure it like we want and this one thing stopped that project.
Zoho is not open so may not have the extensibility options that you want. But Ninja is open, the sky is the limit.
-
@garak0410 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
No integration with the GP customer database.
Not enough customization to includes all fields from the current paper invoice.These are things you can build in yourself. The former doesn't really mean anything, integration is a loose term. We'd need more details to know how easy or hard that would be.
The latter is potentially hard and would easily break the system on new updates. What kinds of fields are missing, is there a simple work around?
-
@scottalanmiller said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
@garak0410 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
We were THIS close to using ZoHo Invoice but they pulled the plug because of no reporting by Delivery Date. I worked like crazy with ZoHo to configure it like we want and this one thing stopped that project.
Zoho is not open so may not have the extensibility options that you want. But Ninja is open, the sky is the limit.
Before responding to the other replies, do you think the self-hosted Invoice Ninja would be a good choice as far as more customization and extensibility? I only looked that their hosted one.
