services wanted Invoicing and Payments Help (20 minutes work)

[X-Pert Pool]

[i posted this yesterday but I chose the wrong forum]

I'm switching my company over to paperless invoicing via laptops this year. It's a seasonal business and I've just learned of filemaker not to long ago and I'm starting to get busy again. I'm using the invoicing solution based on the VTC.com tutorials by John Osborne. Anyways, I've modified the solution to my needs and I need someone to incorporate a few features that I've been having trouble with and I'm basically out of time trying to figure it out on my own.

Naturally I will provide my current solution with admin password so you can modify it.

This work looks easy to me and will probably only take 20 minutes to accomplish for an experienced user.

Items needed:

1.) Right now the solution only has a drop down box to mark an invoice paid. I would like to be able to accept partial payments and payments that can be applied to multiple invoices as well as show the current balance for that customer

(I have some tables already setup for this but this was past my current knowledge)

2.) When Invoicing I would like the "pool opening" product price to automatically change based on some parameters. The price should change based on.

Pool's total square footage ( I have a field for this)

pool's type of cover (water bag covers and vinyl pop-in add $10 to the price)

above ground pool's have a standard price of $189 (unless they have a water bag cover then they are treated as in-ground price)

(I also have some tables setup for this but haven't gotten to incorporate them.)

3.) When Invoicing the "cleaning" product price is based off of the field in customers table called "pool_cleaning_price"

I can offer $50 via paypal O.B.O.

Thank You,

Kevin Stempien

[Vaughan]

Before you go off getting something built you may want to consider whether it's what you really need.

http://fmforums.com/forum/topic/76398-allocating-payments-to-invoices-questions/

This work looks easy to me and will probably only take 20 minutes to accomplish for an experienced user.

Yeah, right.

From the other thread you started, your whole solution needs to be re-built with a correct relational data structure. The reason you are in this position is because database design ISN'T easy.

[X-Pert Pool]

How much work do you think it would be to add a payments table and change two of my products to have a calculated price based on the customers table?

:(

[Drew Sanderson]

Perhaps you should consider using http://www.freshbooks.com/

I know a few professional FileMaker developers who use it for their client billing. These people can build an invoicing solution in their sleep but choose to use Freshbooks instead of or in addition to FileMaker.

[David Jondreau]

How much work do you think it would be to add a payments table and change two of my products to have a calculated price based on the customers table?

I understand Vaughn's response completely. It would take me at least 20 minutes to discuss what the database does and how you've configured it. And that's if you've used a standardized structure and naming convention. If I had the time I might be able to do it for $50, but I wouldn't limit myself to it.

For the invoicing issue, you'll need a Payments table and a Payments Invoice Join table. If this db is shared on a network then, for performance reasons, the totals be stored, which will add development overhead. And you'd need layouts and scripts to match payments to invoices.