Other features for Invoice Manager

Mario
Mario
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Hi,

I was wondering whether following are feasible feature requests:

Ability to add a general condictions page to the invoice
(and others)

Possibility to add additional content as addtional pages to the invoice when it is being rendered into a PDF so that it accompanies the mail to the customer.
Additional content such as General Conditions, shipment info, instructions,...
A simple selection of these documents would tie them to the invoice. When the invoice is being rendered into a PDF, they will make the additional pages to the invoice.
Important that these documents can be entered in a textbox that allows sufficient amount of text and allowing WYSIWYG editing

Ability to define where an invoice has it's page break (PDF)

The invoice's body consists of an items section, payments received and payments pending.
I personally find it crowdy to have all on one page. I think it might confuse the customer if they don't take the time to study the invoice.
It would be nice if Payments Received and Payments Pending could be on page 2.
As not everyone has this requirement, I would rather suggest that the ability is built-in that will allow you to tell where a page break should happen so that the resulting PDF looks perfect in any given situation.

Adding custom fields
When creating/changing the invoice layout to your liking, you can only use the variables that are in the current platform. If you have addtional data that you want to display, you have to add it hardcoded, place it manually in the notes or...
Why not adding a number of custom fields ?

Contact_Custom_Label 1 to 10 + Contact_Custom_Text 1 to 10
Custom Invoice_Label 1 to 10 + Custom Invoice_Text 1 to 10

You can then add custom info for a customer (always available when you charge that customer) or custom info to invoices, so you can display the same custom info on all your invoices.

Anyone else needing these ?
Responses (5)
  • Accepted Answer

    fungel
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    Tuesday, March 17 2015, 02:47 PM - #Permalink
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    I too am looking for option 1 you mentioned. It's possible through custom coding...
    Mario would you be interested in sharing the cost of getting this developed?
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  • Accepted Answer

    Mario
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    Wednesday, March 18 2015, 11:26 AM - #Permalink
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    Hi Fungel,

    When you say you are looking for option 1, do you mean the ability to add general conditions to the invoice when it is being rendered into a PDF file ?

    I'm not sure whether Germinal has this listed as a new feature in the next version of Invoice Manager. I know there are some features that were on my list which will be part of the new release. Germinal might be able to shed some more light on that.

    In the meanwhile, as a workaround:
    First some background of my Invoice Manager installation: I have a multi-lingual setup (Dutch/English) and have national but also international customers. In regards to IM, this means that for each invoice template, I need to have 4 versions: both languages require a separate template and I need to have a clause listed on the international invoices in regards to the VAT regulation in Europe.

    Same goes for the quote templates.

    Next to this, I needed the functionality to add an additional page to each invoice, listing the Terms and conditions. It's basically a static text, it normally doesn't change so adding it as such (static code) to the template code was find by me. I did require the text to appear on a new page.
    So I added this to the existing template code and made sure it was always appearing as one block of text on a new page. Next to this, I added a footer with company info and page numbering.

    This covers the requirements that I have now in regards to an additional Terms and Conditions page.
    I am hoping that it will become a standard feature in the new IM release as every company should be using Terms and Conditions when they create invoices. Also a footer that can be customized from the back-end would be a very nice to have.

    There's one disadvantage: the text displayed in the mail and the text displayed in the invoice PDF tend to differ in regards to formatting. In my case: while I'm using fixed dimensions for the logo, there is a visible difference between what is in the mail and what is in the PDF. Problem is that the logo in the mail is just for display purposes. The logo in the PDF should be having sufficient quality so that still looks okay when being printed. Here's the catch: the most important one is the one for printing, so your parameters should be covering that purpose. In my case, it means that the logo in the mail ends up being twice as big. Also, eg. while the CSS takes care of displaying the invoice using the Helvetica font-family, the text in the mail seems to completely bypass that code and displays the text as Times New Roman. To get around that, I ended up adding the font format as well in the specific line, next to the CSS coding in the style section.

    I have rendered my code more than 100 times before it looked okay - sometimes fixing one things ended up causing an issue for another. That is why it would be so much better to arrange this from within IM, then by manually coding it in the templates.

    Hope this helps.

    As to the other requirements I listed. I have currently 2 people that are interested in these, including me and you, that makes 4. I also so that another person voted, so that would bring our count up to 5.
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  • Accepted Answer

    fungel
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    Saturday, March 21 2015, 01:36 PM - #Permalink
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    Hi Mario,

    Thanks for your reply.
    I'm hoping to have the ability to add another file attached (or multiple) with every quote...
    I don't envy your situation having to deal with multiple languages (and therefore templates...).

    For the moment I will simply create a "Template" to duplicate where I'll put all the small T&C's in the NOTES section of every quote...
    I'm only dealing with one language so this is probably ok for me at the moment.

    I'm still considering paying for custom coding on getting an additional files that can be attached...
    Would you be interested in that option?

    Kind regards, Fungel.
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  • Accepted Answer

    Mario
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    Tuesday, March 24 2015, 07:18 PM - #Permalink
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    I believe we need to have an idea of what is coming in the next release in order to don't duplicate things or to start deviating too much from the public release and miss out on future updates.

    Maybe Germinal can comment on this ?
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  • Accepted Answer

    fungel
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    Monday, March 30 2015, 09:25 PM - #Permalink
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    Yes I totally agree with you Mario.

    Any thoughts Germinal on a Roadmap for Invoice Manager?
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