download invoices improvement

[OptimusBain]

My forum and I guess that many others, have members that pay a subscription or pay for specific products. There is no way for the administrator of an IPS forum to generate and download PDFs. I don't know about other countries, but in Spain and many other countries, my accountant will need to submit all invoices every quarter no matter what.

There is NO WAY in IPS to download all invoices for a specific data range, or even generate them in PDF, etc. If IPS accepts payments, then it has to provide a way to download the legal invoices to be delivered to our accountants. I have hundreds of payments every quarter, and this is driving me crazy because there is nothing like that available and IPS told me by email that this function is not present within the platform 😞 I do not understand why. I am not asking for an accounting software, that will be done by the accountant. However the accountant needs the invoices, and when you have hundreds to process and no option to download them it's just a **** in the a**  

There is no possibility in the backend for:

• Admin to download and generate a specific invoice in PDF
• Admin to generate invoice and send/resend email to member
• Admin to filter billing history of a member and download all invoices in a specific data range
• Member to download an invoice in PDF

 

[Dean_]

I would second something similar. As it’s always been a hot topic in the past and we’ve still seen no improvement on commerce.

It really would be nice IPS to get this in for 5.5 and really concentrate on our commerce app.

[OptimusBain]

13 hours ago, Dean_ said:

I would second something similar. As it’s always been a hot topic in the past and we’ve still seen no improvement on commerce.

It really would be nice IPS to get this in for 5.5 and really concentrate on our commerce app.

Thanks a lot. It's surrealistic to have a forum application that enables us to charge our members and then not provide a simple way to download all invoices to be delivered to our accountant. That tells me that they are programmers but they do not have in mind a forum owner that is making money with his forum and needs to provide the authorities with all the invoices. I am not asking for an accounting module, just a way to download all invoices within a date range and provide some filters. That's all! Thanks again

[Anja Müller]

On 11/9/2020 at 1:58 PM, OptimusBain said:

My forum and I guess that many others, have members that pay a subscription or pay for specific products. There is no way for the administrator of an IPS forum to generate and download PDFs. I don't know about other countries, but in Spain and many other countries, my accountant will need to submit all invoices every quarter no matter what.

There is NO WAY in IPS to download all invoices for a specific data range, or even generate them in PDF, etc. If IPS accepts payments, then it has to provide a way to download the legal invoices to be delivered to our accountants. I have hundreds of payments every quarter, and this is driving me crazy because there is nothing like that available and IPS told me by email that this function is not present within the platform 😞 I do not understand why. I am not asking for an accounting software, that will be done by the accountant. However the accountant needs the invoices, and when you have hundreds to process and no option to download them it's just a **** in the a**  

There is no possibility in the backend for:

• Admin to download and generate a specific invoice in PDF
• Admin to generate invoice and send/resend email to member
• Admin to filter billing history of a member and download all invoices in a specific data range
• Member to download an invoice in PDF

 

Hi,

do you know if there are possibilities to create/resend (PDF) invoices to our customers in the meantime?
That would be veeeeery helpful.
 

Edited February 18, 2022 by Anja Müller

[OptimusBain]

1 hour ago, Anja Müller said:

Hi,

do you know if there are possibilities to create/resend (PDF) invoices to our customers in the meantime?
That would be veeeeery helpful.
 

Nope that I know of. I just don't understand why the PDF and invoices functionalities are stagnated and forgotten.

[Anja Müller]

On 2/18/2022 at 8:33 PM, OptimusBain said:

Nope that I know of. I just don't understand why the PDF and invoices functionalities are stagnated and forgotten.

In February, @Daniel F contacted me that there will be a plugin soon. Unfortunately, there is no further communication since then. Neither there are news in the marketplace ... 😥

[Anja Müller]

On 4/6/2022 at 3:34 PM, Anja Müller said:

In February, @Daniel F contacted me that there will be a plugin soon. Unfortunately, there is no further communication since then. Neither there are news in the marketplace ... 😥

@Daniel F Since I cannot message you, it would be veeeery nice if you reply to this. Thank you!

[LaCollision]

Hi,

Yes, that would be really great!

It's a very popular request:

 

[KT Walrus]

The best way to generate server-side PDFs is to use headless Chrome to convert HTML to PDF running in a docker container. 

I suggest that IPS implement and deploy an API for HTML to PDF conversion like the Spam Service and update Commerce to use this API to generate and store PDFs of invoices for download/email attachment.

Here is a link to a docker container that could be used to implement such a server-side HTML to PDF generator:

https://hub.docker.com/r/selenium/standalone-chrome

There already may be other 3rd party web services available that Commerce could use, but I think it would be better for IPS to host the HTML to PDF service and make that service available to Commerce and app/plugin developers through an HTMLtoPDF class.

[KT Walrus]

I also found this Google documentation on running headless Chrome:

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-chrome

 

[KT Walrus]

I found this 3rd party cloud service for converting HTML to PDF:

https://www.paperplane.app

Maybe someone can implement a Commerce plug-in for generating invoice PDFs (from a template) using this 3rd party API? Looks like this service costs $25/month at a minimum.

I have attached the PDF created from this page. Obviously, the theme used here needs some tweaking (and maybe some page breaks), but this would probably work great for invoice PDFs.

paperplane.pdf