Invoicing

[JamesRamm]

I've had some questions about invoicing so this issue is just to start fleshing out how invoicing would be implemented in longclaw.

• What is the data model?
• What admin (UI) features are required?
• Paypal, Stripe etc support invoicing, so does it make sense for this to leverage their invoicing utils through longclawcheckout/gateways? Should the data be leveraged directly from the integration or should we store (duplicate) in the user db?
• There are 3rd party accounting apps like Wave, Quickbooks etc which support invoicing - is it worth considering these?
• How does this relate to the automated emailing functionality we want to create? (#10)
• Does an invoice need to be tied to a 'product'?
• Consider billing 'cycles' (as stripe calls them)? This basically seems to be subscriptions...

[JamesRamm]

I think a good start to this would be:

• Leverage a single backend payment integration (e.g stripe) and expose an API for sending invoices. It should have the bare minimum info to start with - e.g amount, date due & email
• Don't keep any data longclaw side (at least initially), leveraging the integration to get all info
• A new admin page with all the basic info - show invoices sent, highlight outstanding ones, simple form to send invoice to an email.

That would be a useful and generic first pass, can gather feedback about how it should be expanded.

[thenewguy]

It would be nice to allow multiple payments per order. I've been reading and noticed there is a single payment transaction_id set for the order. Use case: allow deposit to reserve order and then invoice the customer for the balance when order is ready to ship.

[JamesRamm]

@thenewguy I've separated multiple payments per order into a new issue: #208

[fiee]

Not sure if this is included in what you mean with invoicing:

• I need a payment method "on account" for most of our business customers and a few known private customers (i.e. the availability is customer based). Most webshops don’t offer such.
• Up to now we get most orders per other means than the webshop; we’d like to centralize orders there, i.e. most orders will get created by a staff member, and the shop must either send an advance invoice to the customer or must offer a PDF invoice for staff to print/forward.
• ATM we’re using a custom app (bunch of scripts) for invoicing, based on beancount accounting, simple customer/product lists and LuaTeX invoice forms.
• I’d prefer to continue using TeX for beautiful PDFs, i.e. if your invoicing would use Django or Jinja templates for email invoices, I’d need to hook into that: use a template to create a TeX file, asynchronously call LuaTeX and attach the created PDF to the invoice record, send it as email if necessary. (I’d really like to avoid wkhtml2pdf or reportlab...)
• It should be possible to export financial data (beancount would be nice, but any CSV is good enough) for our accounting (maybe that’s already possible).

EDIT: I realized Longclaw doesn’t fit my needs in several regards, will try again to enhance Plata instead. But maybe this is interesting for others, thus I don’t just delete the post.