BambooInvoice Forums

The best recurrence system I saw can be found here in this demo:

http://www.phpbms.org/trial/

If one day it could be possible with Bamboo…

Congratulations! This is a great script.

Regards.

José

Derek Allard - Jan 02, 2009 05:46pm

Hey Forkie, bribery is very effective with me… good call

...

Oh also, I’m grateful for any donations users care to make, and thanks for the plug - Bamboo represents a massive chunk of my time and energy, and people recognizing that always makes me feel great.

I’m with forkie and really want this feature and would be willing to donate some money to the project.

I’ve attached a screen grab from Freshbook’s recurring invoices if that’s any help to anyone. It’s really simple - all you have to do is set the date, frequency and no. of occurrences and off you go!

The only notification the admin gets is through the recent activity feed.

I’m more than happy with this functionality, but need more control over the rest of the system plus it’s quite expensive.

If this was added to Bamboo Invoice it’d be great.

Hiya Derek…

I’m loving your program, dude! Thanks for making it! And thanks for continuing the improvements!

My half-a-cent worth regarding recurring invoices…

For me, a system that ‘automatically’ sends invoices to my clients is rather a dangerous and reckless concept.

I would prefer it to put the automatically-generated invoice in a moderation queue.

It would look something like this…

1. I create an invoice.

2. I tick a box that says, ‘recur monthly/quarterly/annually on X day’.

3. I tick a box that says ‘My invoice is identical every period / My invoice needs to be tailored before sending’.

—-

Somewhere in the background, Derek’s Magic Monkey does its trickery, and determines what to do.

If the user is sending an identical invoice every period, then it pretty much doesn’t need to be moderated by the user. It can just be sent, along with a copy that gets emailed to the user.

If the user wants to tweak things, a moderation message is emailed to the user. Says something like, ‘Dudoid! Your latest invoice to CLIENT is desperately chewing on bamboo shoots awaiting your tweaks. If you wanna be paid, click on INVOICE NUMBER now, and get your tweak on!’

User clicks on the link. Gets magically transported to the invoice in question (which is sitting in a section of Bamboo labelled ‘Invoices Awaiting Moderation’.

User adds a couple of billable hours. Writes a little love-note to the financial director of the client co. Smuggles in a few extra ‘billable client lunches’ in the itemised list. Is satisfied with invoice. Hits, ‘Send!’

—-

That workflow would do the trick for me.

Thanks again!

Blue skies
Love
Roy

PS: In no way was the Bamboo Invoices engine actually being compared to a monkey, magic or otherwise. No animals were harmed in the making of this posting.

Thanks Roy, I appreciate you taking the time to write this out. I have similar thoughts myself, and I’m still trying to work out a specific approach that I’m happy with.

Yeah I like the idea of moderation before sending. Even if the system just creates the invoices automatically but doesn’t send them. It could check and create new recurring invoices at every login. Then on the summary you could have a column that says “Created by” and then show the users name for manually created invoices or “Recurring” or something for automatically created invoices. And ideally there should also be a column saying if they have been emailed yet. Automatic emailing and cron jobs could be more advanced options but it would be nice to have some basic recurring invoice support.

Hi all,

Found this app today and was looking to make this work for my small business.  Recurring billing is exactly what I need, so this feature was essential.  Installed the “recurring” code; worked like a champ.

After reading some of the comments and trying to use the recurring system, it seems that NOT emailing right away is often desirable.  So, I made some mods that also make sense for the existing app:

* Make an “UNSENT” status (including a new radio button) that shows you invoices that haven’t been mailed out yet
  (note that this is like the “overdue” status; there’s an alert if you have UNSENT invoices)
* Allow recurring DUPLICATION of invoices
* Allow recurrence type to vary (days/weeks/months/years)
* Check to see whether any invoices need to be duplicated when you load up the invoices “index” page

There is also still a “recur” controller, but most of the work is done in invoices.php.

I think having an “UNSENT” status is a good one to have anyway; it shows you which invoices you have that have never been sent… which seems like a really odd thing.

Anyway, not to brag ... it’s not the cleanest thing, but it’s actually not too bad.  Put the proper querying code into invoics_model.php, tried to understand the coding style & workflow.  Would be willing to package it up or try to expose a demo if interested.

Ben

Hello,

I’m dropping by to inform everyone of a new version of my Recurring Invoices modification.

With v0.10 a new feature has been added that I arbitrarily dubbed “PayNow”. This effectively renames the modification to “Recurring Invoices + PayNow” (clever, I know).

Anyways this new feature allows you to enter in a Google Merchant ID and a PayPal e-mail into the settings page. By entering in one you will be adding the respective payment buttons to your generated PDF invoice. Neither are required so if you do not need this feature, not using it won’t have an impact on the recurring invoices functionality.

This version also adds additional security measures to the recur script to prevent malicious use. You can download the latest release below:

http://www.amtstudios.com/mods/recurring-invoices-paynow.php

Cheers!

Andrew

Any idea when this feature will come in? I’d like to use bamboo invoice for my hosting company but recurring invoices is an essential addition

It depends on how complex you want it.

If you think Google Calendar with the complexity they have on events and how you can recur an event on your calendar then that solves all your problems and anyone who wants to raise an invoice on a certain day of the month, etc.

I on the other hand don’t need that complexity when it comes to invoicing. I need monthly, yearly and biyearly. I don’t have contractors on anything other than that; but I could possibly see users having every 6 months in there too.

To all the people actually wanting recurring invoices.. what frequency do you need to recur your invoices on?

AMT’s solution seems simple to add into Bamboo. You just need to crack a GUI to be more user-friendly than days. A simple drop-down or such congaing the words and days as values would work, or some fancy GUI and then it calculates the days. Except that would eliminate recurring an invoice on a specific day.

This is a really handy mod, thanks heaps.I’ve made some changes to the recur.php file to get rid of the date attached to the end of the invoice number and replace it with the normal numbering system that BI uses. It fixes the problem where when you go to create a new invoice manually the invoice number box was blank after this mod had run too. That now works as it did before with the correct number in there for the next invoice. If you use this mod you need to find the highest invoice number in your database and the create an invoice with a higher number so the mod gets a clean starting point. The only problem I’ve found is when you run this and there is an invoice that has a higher number than where you started from. When it reaches that higher number it will stop sending, so make sure you give it a clean start and it’s fine. If the invoice that is to recur already has a date attached to it theres no problem that gets stripped off and all your invoices just count off in order from the starting point you gave it. I hope that makes sense. 

For those that are worried about it stopping when it finds an invoice with the same number, change line 44 to this and it will ignore invoice numbers that are already used. That is how BI works by default anyway when you manually enter invoices and it comes across this problem.

That’s really great. You’re doing a good job.

Regards,
Diane

Hi Derek,

I’ve read through this topic, and I understand your time constraints, esp as in another post you’ve said that you’ve just released a new version of ExpressionEngine.

Recurring Invoices is a really desirable feature for me, and I wondered what it would take to make this, if not number 1 priority new feature, at least a higher priority for release in a new version?

I too would be willing to contribute to a coding bounty to see this implemented.  I would also be happy to go through the process you mentioned of creating mock-up screen shots etc. but my time is limited, as I know yours is, and I can’t afford to do this if the feature is to remain as a “one day, maybe”.

So is there a way (or amount ) that would give you the incentive to turn this from a few posts/comments in the forums to a planned feature addition in the next (or at least ‘coming soon’) release of Bamboo Invoice?

Thanks for reading.
Paul