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[Financial Module] Statements/Invoices

Submitted by Guest on Mon, 03/03/2008 - 19:09
in
Hi Everyone, I am currently having a couple of problems with statements & invoices. Firstly, I cannot print statements. Nothing happens when I go to Customers
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Statements

Submitted by tony on Tue, 04/03/2008 - 13:58.
Hi Ross, The statement button in customer Accounts doesn't currently work (no code behind button). It was initially intended to print an individual statement for a customer but we found the Debtors workspace (Reports ->Debtors) could do this as readily and was actually a better mechanism for general end of period and statement printing functions. In the future we may provide access to individual customer statement printing in Customer ->Account workspace but in mean time i will make a note to remove button until this is completed. In regards the Debtors workspace it is a very handy area to do work on debtors and I think it would be helpful to others to explain it's use and operation. In essence this workspace can be used to list your debtors and filter them by a variety of criteria such as current, overdue, account type etc. The table displays relevant debt information including amounts, last payments dates and amounts etc and you can quickly check a customer account details by clicking on the customer name hyperlink and going to Account. You can also print or preview a statement by highlighting the customer in the table and clicking Print button. This can be done at any time and doesn't actually perform an end period for the customer but just gives you a snapshot of the what the statement would look like. The batch statement account function that is typically done at the end of a month is actually two distinct processes. End Period and Print Statements. The end period actually generates accounting fees for customers that have balances based on their account type settings, optional marks and completed invoices as finalised and creates opening and closing balances for any customer that has had account activity in the period. To initiate the end period you select the period end date in the "Statement Date field" in the filter area to the date you want to run your statements too (i.e 29/02/2008) and then click the end period button. You can nominate here if you want to finalise completed invoices. Once the end period has completed you can filter and print statements in any order you wish. Some users do it by account type or overdue status to make it easier to process overdue messages etc. Others just select everything and print all at once. The beauty is you are not constrained how you wish to do this once you have done the end period. You can even do it over multiple days if you like but just make sure the statement date is set to the end period date you are printing statements for. Another thing to note is if the customer has the billing contact purpose assigned to an email address the statement processing will email the statement in pdf format to the customer rather than print it. You can set the email subject and body text in the statement template settings (Administration -> Templates) Lastly the Debtors workspace provides a report that will print a report of the debtors listed for those who like to work from paper .. I hope this helps on the first part of your question. Cheers Tony

How we do our statement runs

Submitted by Matt C on Thu, 08/05/2008 - 15:32.
Hi everyone, Just thought I would relate some of our experience with statements and the Debtor workspace. We have done many statement runs now - I reckon we might be talking maybe >1000 statements generated per run. We made some mistakes and encountered some difficulties that hopefully by posting here you guys might avoid. 1. How we are structured We have the following account types; - Normal, Pensioners, Valued All have 32 day payment terms. - Type 1 Have received late accounts in past or have been bad debtors - now "on watch". Payment terms - 0 days (ie. Any unpaid debt becomes overdue immediately) - Type 2 Are at the debt collectors Payment terms - 0 days (ie. Any unpaid debt becomes overdue immediately) - Type 3 Written off debts (I dont wont to talk about it :( 2.How we sort our statements. We sort our debtors into; 1. Current - Those with a non overdue balance 2. Overdue - - 2.1 The newly overdue clients (Normal, Pensioner, Valued) - 2.2 Those which have received a "urgent action" (Type 1 Account type) - 2.3 Those which have been sent to our debt collector (Type 2) - 2.4 Those with a written off debt (Type 3) 3. Print our Runs Step 1. Print Run 1 - We "Send All" the "Currents". Step 2. We "Send All" the "Overdues" with the Account type set as follows; Print Runs 2,3,4,5 - "Send All" Normal, Pensioner, Valued,Type 1) Pile 1 = Currents -> Australia Post Pile 2 = Normal, Pensioner, Valued -> Accounts Manager Pile 3 = Type 1 -> Accounts Manager Why do we print 5 runs and not just print all the Pile 2 accounts together? Because as yet you can only choose to include one account type. You can't choose from a list of account types which you might want to print or those you might want to skip. But as this is opensource software, if enough people want that sort of filter.... well it only takes some time and money 8O What about the Type 2 & 3 customers you didn't print? Our Account Manager sorts through these on the computer screen using the Debtors workspace to work out what type of torture may be best applied. She prints individual statements if she needs to. What would be nice in the future? 1. Last Payment Date and Last Invoice Date are present in the Workspace grid and are very handy. However you can't sort (the grid want change the sort order as it is a derived field) or filter by this yet. 2. An automatic scheduled "End Period" that fires after 12am on the 1st day of the month. Why? Cos in our install, End Periods takes about 4 hours and it slows the system down (8 hrs when we recently run during the working day!) - so we don't want to run it when working. We could run it on the 2nd or 3rd of the month true, but we like to get statements out close to the 1st of the month as we can. And Im tired of waking up on the first of the month to run at midnight :( 3. Zero value balances are not printed -this is great. But they still appear in the list - often cluttering it up. 4. The printed or unprinted status would be nice to see in a column in the workspace. 5. A report when complete like the Reminders workspace would be a nice trimming - ie. number listed, number printed, broken down by filter criteria (ie. Account type, account age etc). What mistakes did we make? 1. Make sure your End Period date is the 31st of the month if you are using months and not the 1st of the month following. 2. Our clients hated not having dates on the statement items - we changed it in our install - (on our own using Ireport - very easy btw). 3. Others we haven't found out about yet! Hope this helps some people! Matt Costa Boronia Vet Clinic

Invoice Templates

Submitted by tony on Tue, 11/03/2008 - 09:14.
Hi Ross, Sorry for the late reply. As you are aware all invoices, statements , receipts etc are written in jasperreport format, a open source report generator. We have provided a range of different format reports for A4 and A5 formats as well as some that print their own letterhead. If you want to include a graphical letterhead and/or footer you need to utilise the open source Ireport report designer tool to edit one of the existing templates to suit your needs. If you haven't got this tool yet you can download it here.It is easy to install.Jasperreports has the ability to include images in the report template so you can point to existing letterhead graphic elements and place them in set positions in the template. The only thing to be aware of is the images need to be located on the same server that runs the OpenVPMS web application and must be referenced by an absolute path.  On a windows machine this has to be in the format like  i.e. C:\\logo\\header.jpg or the like. So the basic steps would be:
  1. Copy the existing Invoice A4 template supplied with openvpms (invoice.jrxml) and copy to a new file (i.e. invoice ross.jrxml)
  2. Edit the template to add your logos and make any other modifications in iReport.  You can test how these will look and if the logo displays correctly by selecting Build->Compile from the menu and then Build ->Execute with empty datasource.  
  3. Once you are happy with format you can load the new template into openvpms.  Goto Administration_>templates and select the Invoice template and click Edit.  Click the content button and browse to your new template and select.  Save the template. 
  4. If you are changing from A5 to A4 invoices you will also need to modify the Invoice Items template which is the sub-report that the invoice template uses to detail the individual charges.  Select the Invoice Items temaplet frm the list and edit and upload the invoiceItems.jrxml file supplied in the openvpms installation.
Ross, I hope this helps to get you started.  Remember if you stuff it up you can always reload the original templates in openvpms to get back to where you were.  Yell if you need more help.CheersTonyP.S.   I would like to eventually have a repository of templates on the website that people can upload and download.  these can be for these reports, also open office templates and adhoc reports which can be run in Reporting ->Reports.  Would anyone like to help set this up and manage it ?

Statements & Invoices

Submitted by rb (not verified) on Wed, 12/03/2008 - 13:36.
Hi Everyone, and thanks for the reply Tony. Unfortunately I have hit the wall early & hard trying to set up invoices etc with my letterhead header & footer. I have copied & renamed the Invoice A4 template, but can't copy & paste the elements from my letterhead which I have saved in Openwriter. My letterhead is a text file, do I meed to change it to another format to be able to copy & paste to iReport? Regards, Ross

Statements & Invoices

Submitted by tony on Wed, 12/03/2008 - 14:16.
Hi Ross, When you say your letterhead is a text file do you mean the letterhead is purely text and doesn't contain any images i.e logo's ? If that is the case you should be able to replicate your letterhead directly in iReport using the standard static text components and setting the appropriate font styles and sizes. To confirm we are on the same page so to speak it may be worthwhile sending your open office letterhead document to my private email address. This may make it easier to point you in the right direction. Cheers Tony
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