Example: A Customized Invoicing System

Situation:

A client of ours, EveryTruckJob.com (ETJ), is an Internet-based recruiting service in the trucking industry. They maintain a large customer database in use on the Internet, and use QuickBooks for their books as well as their invoicing. The site was developed by CMI completely in a web programming language and a relational database system. ETJ has many paying clients all over the country, and billing is done on a monthly basis.

The Problem:

Invoicing was accomplished by an employee manually entering customer data, payment amounts, due dates, etc into the accounting package that they pulled from their customer database. However, QuickBookds was not linked to ETJ’s customer database resulting in a time-consuming, manual billing process very susceptible to human error. Since this program, and process, was what they knew, they simply made do.

Enter the Programmer

Doing some research, we found that QuickBooks allows you to import your own invoices if they adhere to a certain specification. We were able to create an application on their Internet site that directly accesses the information from the customer database to create invoices. Now, with a click of the mouse, the day’s invoices are compiled and instantly e-mailed, faxed, or printed for mailing while a record of each invoice is stored to be processed by QuickBooks.

Summary

This example illustrates two benefits about customized software. First, since we had developed the site for ETJ, it was easy to extend it to include new functions. Second, it shows the ability to automate processes between two (or more) unrelated applications. It also preserved the effort spent on learning QuickBooks. ETJ did not have to change how they do their books, and are no longer hindered by the manual invoicing process.