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e-Bills is a server-side tool for generating bills or invoices to your clients. All of the PHP code,
configuration files and documentation are available under the GNU GPL licence. e-Bills also includes a
Billing Engine that supports more complex billing scenarios and provides some big productivity advantages.
e-Bills was written with some strong design principals in mind:
- Ease of use by any member of staff
- Productive generation of bills to regular clients
- Automated generation of bills for service or usage-based contracts
- Handle high volumes of data
- Responsive user interface with limited client side code
- Minimal key strokes and mouse clicks
- A good level of security
- Usable by contact centre staff handling billing enquiries
- Develop using well documented and supported tools
e-Bills produces bills as PDF files for printing, faxing or emailing. These files
are also archived, so that you can be sure of seeing the customer's copy when handling billing
queries.
It is also useful for businesses that send out ad-hoc bills or invoices,
and recently added some features to better support this.
For regular bills though it brings some big (and automated)
rewards.
e-Bills creates bills (or invoices) for your business efficiently and allows
you to send them to customers by post, email or fax and archives them for solving later
billing queries. It provides any user on
your LAN the possibility of using the system through their existing web browser.
No more worries about configuring client PCs here!
e-Bills can also be used in an ASP-type environment to produces bills for multiple businesses from a single server.
It uses information that you or your employees have entered, allows
them to view it, but more importantly it automates the task of bill-production
for your customers. Bills are produced as PDF files.
The following components need to be installed on your server for e-Bills to
operate:
- Apache web server, version 1.3.9 or above (www.apache.org)
- PHP version 4 (www.php.net)
- MySQL database version x (www.mysql.com )
- LaTeX, text processing system (ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/ctan/tex-archive/systems/linux/teTeX/current/distrib/)
- ghostscipt (ps2pdf) (www.ghostscript.com)
There is also a Billing Engine available only as a binary, which can be used to do an 'overnight' billing
run or improve performance of the web side application.
There's loads of features, we've tried to group them here:
Users
- Multi-user access using web browser
- Supports different classes of user to ensure security of data (if required)
- Fully integrated and context sensitive help system
- Secure user access
Bill format
- Bills created as Portable Document Format (PDF) files
- Bill formats designed for your needs and include your own logo / graphics
- Bills may be printed on a huge selection of available printers
- Archive of all bills produced
- Bills may be printed, faxed or emailed
- Bill messages
Time saving
- Export of key data to spreadsheet
- Customer and contract notes (V2)
- Payments received management & reporting (V2)
- Conglomerate billing (V2)
System
- High performance SQL database
- Stores customer, contract and product data
- No additional workstation software
- Modules for customers, contracts, products and charges
- Automated or manual billing runs
- Can be managed remotely if required
- Highly configurable
General
- Supports many billing scenarios
- service / utility bills on a monthly bills
- ad-hoc charging to customer contracts
- Quarterly or Annual bills to customers
- time & materials projects billed when required
- refunds
- Configuration via the browser by Super-Users
- selection of billing template
- setting / changing billing organisation details
Products / services or items billed
- Complete product / price management tool
- Supports install, monthly and final-balloon charges
- Uses your existing referencing schemes
- customer reference number
- contract or meter or order reference number
- product or service codes
- refunds
The following are the components of e-Bills:
- SQL Database, storing information about user, customers, contracts,
products, charges, bills issued and your organization.
- Dynamic generation of html (and some JavaScript) using PHP
- Client side menu written in JavaScript.
- Text processing system that converts a template bill into PostScript and
PDF files.
- A Billing Engine that can be run as a cron job to do a nightly bill run and
significantly improves performance and functionality.
The following are the new features included in e-Bills:
Version 1.1
- Billing Engine created and demo binary included in release
- Ease of configuration of organisation data
- Mainly bug fixes
Version 1.2
- Export of customer, product and bills data
- Billing Engine supports more complex scenarios
- Uses proper invoice numbers
- Help file updated
- Imrovements to database tables
- Login functionality updated to show last login and login failures for users
- Various bug fixes and changes to consistency
Version 1.3
- Major update to Billing Engine to support improved table structure
- Invoice number functionality improved
- Billing Engine reads config from file if required
- Added check box to "Add customer" to create default contracts
- Email of bills capability added (html & plain text format)
- This HOWTO updated
- Bug fixes
Version 1.4
Coming soon ...
- User entered notes against customers and contracts
- Payments received and payments outstanding report
- Proper support for metered billing
- Conglomerate billing
- Language file making translation possible
- Ability to fax bills
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