Among the more fundamental building blocks of Publishers’ Assistant are the customer orders and receipts features. Much of the behind-the-scenes capability depends on the sales and receipts data you log in the process of selling books. There has been some discussion so far of using WooCommerce™. But WooCommerce is a shopping cart tool. You may choose to use it for invoicing, but I suspect many will feel more comfortable with a tool that is meant for invoicing.
There are several free invoicing solutions out there. So, it doesn’t make much sense to me to develop our own. Rather, I propose this as a research project to choose the best available tool that will fit in with the approach we are taking.
Some of the criteria that comes to mind:
- Ease of use (of course)
- Programming language – If customization is necessary, it would be great to keep things consistent with other development tools.
- Does it support a REST API?
- Does it have any unique hosting requirements?
- Longevity and reputation.
Here are a few examples I have scoped out so far.
- Freshbooks
- Invoicely
- quickbooks – not free, but should probably be considered.
There are many other online invoicing applications, several of which are free.
I believe this research can be done in a week. Getting several of us together may take a bit more doing. So, conducting an online introduction to interested parties (pledgers) would likely be part of the decision process. A final decision will be made by the group.
The implication is that future interfaces to PubAssist modules will be built on the chosen invoicing tool.