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Create entries from a checklist
Let's say I have 10 customers each created using a 'customers' form. Each customer has their own monthly subscription rate, which is set in the same form. There is also a status: either 'current', for customers who are paying for their subscription, or 'dormant', for customers who have stopped paying. I would like to be able to generate an invoice at the end of the month for each of the 'current' customers.
So far I have created a 'invoice' form, which is able to look up the subscription rate for an *individual* customer, however for all current customers (let's say there are 8 current ones) I need to individually create 8 entries, either from a repeating section or simply 8 separate entries. Obviously 8 is not too many, but if the business grows to a 100 active customers this would be a big waste of time. What I really would like is to be able to automatically generate the invoices based on the active customers in the customers form. It's important to separate the invoice form from the customer form because there is more data that needs to be stored for the invoices, which is specific to each month, and it would really clutter the main customer form to try to put it in there.
For the invoice form I am able to display the whole list of customers as a checkboxes lookup field, however, I can't think of a way to mass-display each customer plus their individual subscription rates and other data from the invoice form. The only way I can imagine doing this is with individual entries for each customer and each month.
At the moment I'm doing this using Excel and Word as a mailmerge, [sarcasm]which is a neverending delight[/sarcasm], but I'd love to move this to Formidable as that's where the up-to-date customer information lives. However I'm no database wizard and I can't get my head around how to do this. My suspicion is that I'm using the wrong tool for the job, and that I need to pay for a special invoicing solution that is separate from Formidable. But I don't want to do that!
I appreciate any advice from people who are better at databases than I am.
January 23, 2019 at 2:58 am
Hi Kit,
I'm perhaps not better at databases than you, but what comes to my mind immediately of your situation, is some kind of "subscription" plan/tool. They can attach for example the WP user accounts (which you can extend with your own meta data) + some product and scheduled online payment system, for example WooCommerce.
January 23, 2019 at 6:32 am
If you use a service like Stripe, you can setup automatic subscription invoicing/payments using that tool. Or as one of my clients does, uses Formidable to generate an invoice, but integrates it to his QuickBooks Online through Zapier.mWith Formidable's Zapier Add-on, you can integrate Formidable with any of the hundreds of systems that work with Zapier. This means you can probably auto-create an invoice in your accounting tool in real-time when a person subscribes on your site.
February 2, 2019 at 1:14 am
Thank you vfontjr and Katja. I've spent some time working with this and have realised that there is no way to avoid creating an individual entry for each invoice, since each invoice amount may change. The question then becomes, how can I do this most easily using Formidable? In the end I discovered using a repeater field for each customer, just selecting the customer's name or ID which draws the necessary details from other forms. This can then be displayed in a view, and printed to PDF and even onto paper.
One reason for not using something more powerful (third party invoicing or some kind of memerships system in Wordpress) is that these customers all pay face-to-face in cash, so there's no need for them to create accounts or indeed interact with the site in any way. This is purely for printing invoices.
Anyway I'm grateful for the advice.
Discussion closed.