VIC CRM for Notes - News: I'm going to shoot for putting together a minor release for the Christmas holidays. The impetus for this is a new feature fo
I'm going to shoot for putting together a minor release for the Christmas holidays. The impetus for this is a new feature for the Sales database.
I'd forgotten that I'd planned it from the very start I "re-invented" it and began implementing it yesterday.
You already know And you know that VIC can create simple sales orders and invoices, and pull the line items from the products catalog (usually implemented as a category in the Library, but it can be a separate db).
Well, now I've added a default hourly billing rate on the Financials tab for each customer organization. Whenever you create a new JournalEntry it will pull in the hourlyrate (this replaces the "billrate" field). When you click the "billable" checkbox on a JournalEntry, then it makes the hourlyrate visible and so you can edit it. No worries there, right?
The neat part is that when adding line items to an invoice, you can either add products from the catalog or activities from the Journal. It will display a picklist that displays all completed JournalEntries that haven't yet been billed (filtered for the customer organization on the Invoice). It puts in the Subject as the line item description and calculates the amount from the JournalEntry duration * hourly rate. Behind the scenes, it also stores the JournalEntry's UniqueID so if there are questions about a line item, you can click Lookup and it will display the JournalEntry itself.
It also marks the JournalEntry with a hot link to the Invoice, so there's never a question as to whether or not it's been billed.
Can't do that with Outlook 2007.
Most of this is implemented. What remains is changes to the Sales dB's CratchitProductLibrary script library to allow the lookups and deletions (there's a new text list behind the scenes to account for).
The other bit to be done is a Duration calculation. I'm putting that into the JournalEntry form, since I've got a couple of different reports and features in mind that will need it. Duration will be expressed in minutes.
It's minor work, and I actually expect it to be done this weekend. I'll then let it stew for a week or two before posting to (hopefully) shake out any major bugs.