Billing and Payment System

lajkonik86

Im thinking about implementing a nice billing and payment database and using mailmerge to send out the bills.
Im not sure whether i want to

having the billing and payment database on my website
have that info on my pc and mock it up with access
use a standalone program

I think im favoring option 1. cause the amount which will need to be billed is dependent on statistics provided from the website. So billing would be easier to automate. Are there any security or other problems with option 1 though?

NogDog

Yes, there are security issues you must consider and address if you are going to store/process any data which, if compromised, will be harmful to you and your customers.

http://phpsec.org/projects/guide/

MarkR

If you choose to write your own code, that is dependent on your developers doing it correctly.

It will be important to your business that it does not make errors - therefore you might want to consider an off-the-shelf package, as it will reduce the chance of errors.

Of course it depends on how customised your requirements are.

Personally, I'd write a requirements document, and ask someone to see if they can find a reasonably priced commercial offering which matches it. If not, get your development team to spec up a solution and try to estimate how long development will take - you can then decide whether to opt for an in-house solution.

If you are a software development house however, your probably want your developers to be spending their time developing software for your customers, not your own internal use.

This sounds like a severely management-type decision - I assume you are the manager.

Mark

Roger_Ramjet

Overall, accounting packages are difficult to get right. It is not the basic algorithm that is the problem, it is all the error handling required. Getting their bills wrong is a good way to upset and loose customers so getting it right is a must for any business. There are also all the tax and other legislative issues to cater for.

Remember, if accounting packages where easy there would be loads of them around instead of the few that actually do exist. Far better to find one that does the job before considering writing your own.

Also, do not put it up on the web; run it locally and set up a data feed from the site. Far easier to control security that way.

lajkonik86

my requirements are fairly simple though

just need to calculate the amount for the bill:
- amount of fees - fees already paid = billing ammount
- taxes = 0.19 * billing ammount
- total = taxes + billing
then combine that with the customer data to create a
- database entry for this bill
- database entry that a letter needs to be send

then a little php page to find the bill from the database and tick it when its payed
and a little page showing statistics of outstanding bills

use some a double id notation for the comment on the bill something like abc123 so that even when they write it partly wrong its no problem. What can go wrong?

(I must be missing something) (please let me know before coding😛)