WCD : A small invoicing demo

[mronck]

For those of you who are considering using Web Components on the Desktop (or WCD), I created a small demonstration on how invoicing could be done using that technology.
In this case, invoicing is part of an application I am developing for the Horse Industry.
This application has several management modules which would let the user create appointments or book activities for any particular horse, after which the actual cost for that activity can be reserved for invoicing.
These items are called "historical invoice items" as opposed to "regular invoice items".
Hence, the invoicing system demonstrated here has two child-tables linked to one parent table (the invoice headers).

The main purpose is not to show how invoicing works (which is rather obvious for any developer) but to show how this would look like if you used WCD technology instead of your regular forms.
In this way you might get an idea how this works and what your look-and-feel could be.

If you have any questions about this, just ask and who knows I might even have a sensible answer to that .

[Selwyn Rabins]

Re: WCD : A small invoicing demo

This is a very impressive app. It really shows off the power of building a desktop app using web components.


And of course, having built the desktop app using web components, should the need every arise to access the app over the internet, NO additional work is required. it can be instantly deployed as a web app. that's a compelling benefit in my view.

[martinwcole]

Re: WCD : A small invoicing demo

Marcel - are you using dbf's or sql in your app?

[martinwcole]

Re: WCD : A small invoicing demo

fairly impressive programming - although in real life I would have auto generated a general ledger number based on the charge
and in real life, unless the charge was entered before the treatment had been administered, the customer limit has no practical value
also, was the data on a workstation or server or in cyberspace - seemed to be fairly slow in the demo

[mronck]

Re: WCD : A small invoicing demo

Martin, thank you for your reaction!

1) I used DBF's in this application.

2) Your comments (I think?) seem to be based on the assumption that this is a custom made application. It's not. So "auto generating" general ledger account numbers based on the charge would not be a great idea since we have no idea how the financial administration of the final customer will be organized and there would actually be thousands of possible different charges. There are many different general ledger account systems and this system allows to be operated in a great number of those systems. Any accounting system I know of will let you choose a general ledger account number at the time the cost is booked, and will never have this done automatically (exempt some internal system bookings).

The application has a fully flexible general ledger system onboard and the user can modify it at will to fit his accounting setup. The currently chosen way it works allows for any numeric ledger account to be chosen to match any specific type of situation with just a few pre-conditions: your general ledger account must range from 0-9999, your debtor subsystem must range from 10000-19999 and your creditor-subsystem must range from 20000-29999. That is called the decimal system here. There are relationships between the general ledger account number and cost groups. So any cost in range 4000 will match cost group 4 on the profit and loss account. The invoice items that are auto generated by the system also have that freedom: at the moment the cost is entered in the subsystem, the user can choose the general ledger account number on which it needs to be booked. In the invoicing system, this chosen account number will be automatically inserted and the user does not have to select one there. Can change it though should he want to.

3) The customer limit (if you mean the credit limit) does have practical and managerial value. The invoice won't submit until you either change the limit or the invoice. Which often means, that an employee has to contact a supervisor to ask him to change the value of the credit limit (as should). Would he BE the supervisor, he would have clearance to do that himself. Point is, that the actual overdraw of the customers' credit limit gets NOTICED and acted upon accordingly. There is a signalling function in that for management. Credit limits should not be issued too easy and quite often there is an obligation from the credit assurance company to set a limit on any specific customer and in case of non-payment the credit assurance company would not cover the damage on customers where you did exceed that limit without their prior approval.

4) The application in the demo ran on an older workstation with windows 8, a Pentium 4 CPU on 3.00GHZ, 3GB internal memory and it has a windows performance index of only 3,7 which would explain the fairly slow performance considering also other software was running in the back. Of course, speed of the application depends on may parameters and it is to be expected that on todays' 5i or 7i processors with enough onboard memory this runs like mad.

[martinwcole]

Re: WCD : A small invoicing demo

As for performance, I rather imagined that running the video recorder and other factors were affecting performance.

As for the credit limit requiring authorization, since the horse has already been treated, drugs administered, etc., it is too late. In another app, though, where orders were being entered before shipment, it would be quite useful.

In my own apps, I give the owner a daily report for A/R with warnings, and red flags when the account comes up on the system.

As for the general ledger numbers, it would be nice if you gave the customer the ability to assign transactions to specific ledger accounts - thus they would automatically be posted to those accounts. Otherwise, it will be annoying for the user to have to pick a number for every transaction, and most likely lead to errors, as they would occasionally pick the wrong numbers, especially if there was a fill-in operator.

I think it would also be nice if the tax was auto inserted. It could be assigned in a utility table with contants, like the company name, address, tax percent, etc. I think in this app, since the volume will likely be very low - maybe 10 invoices/bills per day, a lot of choices having to be made could be tolerated. But in another app, where you have several operators knocking out 100 or more invoices per day each, with many line items each, they would go nuts!

[mronck]

Re: WCD : A small invoicing demo

Martin, you make good and valuable points. To some I disagree, some I think are most certainly worthy of consideration.

The video recorder (being software running in the background) most certainly was one of the effects that influenced the presentation speed. A faster computer however would tuck that away with ease. I can honestly say, that without the video recorder running, overall speed is good whilst running in the development environment.

As far as the choice of account numbers is concerned, there is some assistance in presenting the lookup options at this point. Only the group of numbers that is expected to be assigned to any turnover is presented. In this case, using the decimal general ledger account system, this means that group 8 would use ledger account numbers 8000-8999 and thus those are the only ones presented in the lookup.
However, I understand your suggestion about coupling certain transactions to certain numbers. In itself this sounds very reasonable, but at ANY point the user would have to make A CHOICE. Somewhere the user would have to make a choice and set it for future use, the more "back" in the system you do that, the more restrictive this will turn out to be.

Example:
If you connect a general ledger account number to a transaction type, any of those transactions would use that number, and the customer would have to choose the transaction type (instead of the general ledger account now). He still has to make a choice, and the options are more restrictive since he can not differentiate at runtime.

An option would be to connect an account number to a transaction type, and next connect a transaction type to a creditor. Now, when choosing the creditor, the transaction type would be filled in and so would the account number. This restricts the options even more and makes things more complex since one creditor could have more then one transaction types. Hence you are creating a building for something a shed would suffice for.

How it is done here is how it is done in any accounting system I know. When you book your banktransactions, any row would require you to enter/choose the appropriate account number. Yes, this sets forward a risk of choosing the wrong number. But on the other hand it delivers maximum flexibility. Next, we try to minimize faults the user could make by validation techniques. That is what I do as well. There is validation at the account number field.

As far as the sales tax is concerned you did not get it quite right. That is not your fault since you can't see everything in a demo video. But actually it is the case, that both the "regular"-invoice items and the "historical"-invoice items both automatically fill in the related sales tax. The customer does not have to do that. In case of the "regular" items he only needs to add date and amount, and in the case of the "historical" items even those are automatically filled in. There really is hardly any space to speed this up even more, at least, as I see it.
Here is a very small video where I demonstrate this last paragraph

[Keith Hubert]

Re: WCD : A small invoicing demo

Marcel,

Very well done, nice video presentation.

As Selwyn has suggested, this looks like your application could also be sold as Online with a Subscription.

I notice that you have credit limit for the total of each invoice, does your application take a Credit Limit for the Customer, regardless of the value of the Invoice?

[mronck]

Re: WCD : A small invoicing demo

Marcel,

Very well done, nice video presentation.

As Selwyn has suggested, this looks like your application could also be sold as Online with a Subscription.

I notice that you have credit limit for the total of each invoice, does your application take a Credit Limit for the Customer, regardless of the value of the Invoice?

Quite smart of you to notice that Keith! Indeed, this is something that still needs to be implemented but is not yet. However, this information is available within the system so this only takes a roundtrip to "the server". There are several other things that also need to be implemented like the actual booking of the invoice to accounting and the printout of the invoice/report. So it is not completely finished yet. However, the demo is meant to make a point showing WCD rather then the actual applications functionality.

Actually, WCD is what I would call "true hybrid".
It can exist on the desktop (thanks to the working preview protocol) AND it can exist on the web (thanks to WAS Server).
It really is up to you and your customer what it will be.
When you start using it as a desktop application and later on would like to use it as a web application indeed this would take only some little adjustments to make that happen.
I know it's a bold statement, but I really feel there are quite a lot of reasons that put WCD technology above the "old desktop". It's platform adaptability is only one of those.

[r.akabane25]

Re: WCD : A small invoicing demo

May I ask the alpha program samples of your video? i need to learn it

[r.akabane25]

Re: WCD : A small invoicing demo

May I ask the alpha program samples of your video?

[Keith Hubert]

Re: WCD : A small invoicing demo

Hi Dicky,

The video from mronk is no longer available. Most videos are available from within Alpha Anywhere, click Videos button

What exactly do you need to learn?

[r.akabane25]

Re: WCD : A small invoicing demo

okay..thanks keith

[Ray in Capetown]

Re: WCD : A small invoicing demo

May I ask the alpha program samples of your video? i need to learn it

Dickie appears to be asking for the sample program from the attached video, to what video do you refer that is no longer available Keith?

[Ray in Capetown]

Re: WCD : A small invoicing demo

Later
Yes I see this is no longer available