Retail company version

One thing I can think of: it would be nice to have a Direct Invoice and Payment option, where you can enter in the items that are being sold, and apply payment all on the same screen.

If you could have a way to quickly add a customer (ie, Name, email, phone number) on this screen, we'd have something close in functionality to a direct cash sale to a customer.

Our company is mainly B-B and Payments from customers seems awkward to me also.  The way we get most of our sales work are by creating SO's from the Zencart module. Then we do Delivery Against Sales Orders followed by Select Another Order For Dispatch till we have dispatched all the orders from a batch of downloaded orders. We then do Invoice Against Sales Delivery and followed by Select Another Delivery For Invoicing until all Sales Deliveries are invoiced. All of this seems to go well and is pretty fast in batches of 25 or 30 orders at a time. The lists created for these two operations work nicely and the Select Another works as expected.

Now comes the slow awkward part of the process. It seems that the only way to enter customer payments is by clicking Customer Payments.  When I do that, unlike the above process, I am not provided any list of open invoices or list of customers with balances owed to our company.  We have to do a search for each customer by name.  This is a very slow process especially compared just picking a customer/invoice from a list and clicking a button. 

It seems that there should be a pick list of customers/invoices from which we can select the customer for entering a payment so that Payments work just like Dispatch and Invoice.

Thanks,

ed10

This kind of workflow can use the SimpleAPI extension to create a single web form which posts directly into FA.

If I understand you correctly, in the QB scenario, you did not have the Customer info in QB to start with and after invoicing as well, you do not have a separate Customer record for each customer - just the invoices with several customer names.

FA can simulate the above using a dummy web / cash customer where the Delivery to can be the real customer and his info. That way you need not add customers for each invoice. Just use the dummy one for all such invoices.

Well, this is not exactly true. New customer is registered on single page, and default branch is created automatically (unless you use not up to date FA version).

Janusz

I didn't try Customer Allocation Inquiry much because I don't think I quite understand how it works.  When I click on the Payment icon, it takes me to Customer Payments page listing the invoices for the customer.  Below the discount info, the amount of the invoice that I clicked appears.  Then in the listing for the invoice, if I click allocate all to the clicked invoice the amount below, is increased by the amount of the invoice.  That makes the payment double.   Why does the allocate all increase the payment amount?
 
  If I just leave the allocation blank and click make payment then the invoice continues to show up in the Customer Allocation Inquiry list and nothing in that list (searching only on sales invoices) shows that the customer made a payment.
 
  It seems that what should happen is when I click allocate all on the proper invoice the payment amount should match the amount of the invoice. Then when the payment is made it is allocated to the invoice and the invoice will not be on the Customer Allocation Inquiry list as open. 
 
Adding link back to Customer Allocation Inquiry on final payment  screen would be very helpful.

Do I not understand how this works or am I doing something wrong or is the increasing amount of payment by clicking all wrong?

Hope I explained my problems with this.

ed10

@apmuthu:
I'm not sure what you mean, but maybe you have not encountered new $auto_create_branch switch in config.php, which have to be set to create the linked defualt customer branch automatically.

@ed10:
Oh yes, the amount doubling is just a bug, I will fix it in next minor version (I personally work on customized FA version, and seems I've forgot to send bufix back to main sources some time ago). In mean time you can allocate payments to invoices using Allocate Payments or Customer Credit Notes page.

@kharding:
Ok, maybe this is good idea to add additional icon additinally to F# keys. I will try to add this in some next FA version.
Regarding the cash payment - this feature works just automatically when you select payment terms of cash type.

Janusz

Thanks Janusz, the  $auto_create_branch switch was missing. Looks like backward compatibility did me in! Updated config.php page on the Wiki to reflect all variables as on date in the English version. Offline PDF version available.

Also corrected some small typos and included extra variable / necessary comments in the config.default.php file and am attaching the diff patch from Mer 3119.

Thanks Janusz,

I did add the link and it is a big help.  How can I make the link go to the full list of open invoices instead of defaulting to the previous company that I just did the payment for? I know I can click to get all customers, but that is just one more step that I thought could be avoided. 

Along that sort of same idea, for some searches, for example sometimes for customers, I hit space, enter a fragment of a company name and the result says All Customers, then with I click the list is in the dropdown, it is possible  that the first company on the list comes up?  For one thing, when one does a search and the text box comes back with the All Customers it is sort of disconcerting, as if nothing was found.

Thanks for the link.

ed10

Janusz:

I think that customer_id=" should be customer_id=''

ed10

No, the parametr should just be empty (no quotes nor double quotes).
If unsure, try it yourself.
Janusz

sales/customer_invoice.php was slated to be updated with the fix here in v2.3.14 - it appears not to have been done as yet.