Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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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.
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So what part of all of that is missing from the solutions that you have looked at?
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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?
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@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.
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@garak0410 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
@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.
Yes, with self hosted you have full access to the database and can report from it however you like. Instead of needing to be a coding master and deal with the dangers of building an invoicing system, you need only connect to the database "Read only" safely from something like PHP or Ruby and generate reports. Building your own report portal is "trivial" and "safe". Building an invoice system is non-trivial and risky.
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And if your reporting system fails, no big deal. The company doesn't fail while you wait to get it fixed. But if you write your own invoicing system and something goes wrong or that retired guy doesn't want to maintain it, tough cheese.
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@garak0410 You may also want to look into using our Zapier integration.
https://zapier.com/zapbook/invoice-ninja/microsoft-dynamics/
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@hillel369 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
@garak0410 You may also want to look into using our Zapier integration.
https://zapier.com/zapbook/invoice-ninja/microsoft-dynamics/
Boom! There you go!
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@scottalanmiller said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
@hillel369 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
@garak0410 You may also want to look into using our Zapier integration.
https://zapier.com/zapbook/invoice-ninja/microsoft-dynamics/
Boom! There you go!
Boom! Interesting...
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@garak0410 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
@scottalanmiller said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
@hillel369 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
@garak0410 You may also want to look into using our Zapier integration.
https://zapier.com/zapbook/invoice-ninja/microsoft-dynamics/
Boom! There you go!
Boom! Interesting...
I wonder if @hillel369 can tell us anything about a reporting interface from which you can write your own reports?
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@scottalanmiller Although the app is quite complicated the database schema is pretty straightforward, from reading your earlier notes you may be best off writing custom reports against the database. Note: this would only be possible using the self host version of the app.
If you have any questions I'm happy to help.
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I am going to test it out. Signed up for my trail now.
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@hillel369 said in Invoice Software - Office 365 Or Purchase Software Suite?:
@scottalanmiller Although the app is quite complicated the database schema is pretty straightforward, from reading your earlier notes you may be best off writing custom reports against the database. Note: this would only be possible using the self host version of the app.
If you have any questions I'm happy to help.
Was wondering if there was any way to access the DB, or better just an API, from the hosted version. The hosted pricing is so affordable it's hard to resist.
