There are a wide range of problems associated with invoices generated by OFN and they have been discussed many times- both here and in github issues.
I wondered if it would be good to have a thread where we can list all the problems in one place.
As food hubs grow and prosper on OFN the more sustainable the platform becomes. We want to keep large food hubs engaged with OFN rather than moving onto different software platforms when they reach a critical size. One of the main limitations of our software at the moment, in terms of what the large users need, is legal and compliant invoicing.
In some respects, since the current invoices generated by OFN are not legal and hence require hubs to do extra work to amend them appropriately, is there an argument for removing the invoice option from Reports/Orders and instead improving guides to integrate OFN with outside accounting software (such as Xero or Quick Books)?
Yes please! It would be good to have everything which is āwrongā with invoices in one place so that wholesale changes can be made.
Are you able to merge the two threads here? Iām not sure how to
Thanks @Rachel
I concur that invoices need work. Iām not sure about removing orders all together though for 2 reasons:
it seems to me that we are a long way from an easy, seamless, free way for a user to export their orders into an accounting platform, and today many of our users do not use accounting platforms at all ā¦ so OFN orders management is all they have.
even for those enterprises who are working with accounting packages, they often still manage orders in OFN - ie: removing items that were not available, adding in last minute purchases, issuing creditsā¦ so we need a solid orders management process in OFN for this.
Maybe the invoicing piece by itself can be done in external accounting software?
Iāll try to 'merge both threads into here as best I can without doing an awful copy-paste job.
I think what would be really helpful (as always) is next time an instance manager who also uses invoices on the platform is going to either do it for their own produce or helping another user out is to do a screen capture + audio capture video and to show me how you do things/use things currently. No performance needed! just record what youād usually do so I can watch and understand what happens.
Weāll likely need to store these outside of discourse as theyāll have customer info, but this would be a massive help for the ux part.
Sure thing e. keeping this one for tax and the other for amendments. Shall we change the title of this post from āInvoiceā to āInvoice: tax issuesā?
Re. issue you mean issue #5789? the papercut? yes that one, if we do any further discussion, will for sure not be a papercut and be a topic that needs discovery/inception work! I would keep discovery work to the collection of these discourse posts which can inform an epic/issues. That will likely be something @Jana has thoughts on how to do process wise
@Erioldoesdesign - OFN-CAN manages orders and invoicing for a large hub here (we do it as a service on contract) - so I do this every wed night. I can easily take some videos. But the videos will show you more about how the order mangaement process works (adding, deleting, making adjustments to orders) in order to PREPARE the final invoices and final reports. Orders have to be adjusted in order for the invoices and reports to be accurate. The invoice part is more of a static document and sharing it. Regardless - my problem is I donāt know any software to record this. So - if it works (awkward I know), I can do you a little zoom recording? is that OK?
Further on this (as I think more) - the order adjustment process WILL show the kinds of history we need the invoice to have. ie - if a product is added, or deleted, or a fee is waivedā¦ So - maybe this will be helpful on this issue after all.
Can anyone tell me please ā I just realized this issue was also addressing taxation issues on invoices (sorry I missed that before). Are we thinking the issue will address tax issues when tax is included in prices (VAT) as well as tax issues on invoices where tax is not included in price (in NA for example)? Because - that is a much bigger issue. As I understand it - right now, the database does not store taxes by line - when they are not included in price. So its a bigger project to create that stored data, rather than āsimplyā making sure it is pulled onto an invoice. Am I making sense?
I did my first video! So - really rough - but here is the process of adjusting and order, and showing the current invoice associated with that order. NOTE - there are 2 places where orders can be adjusted in OFN - the āordersā tab and the ābulk orders managementā tab. This vid is showing the orders tab because I wanted to show you how items are added to an order. The BOM tab is much nicer and smoother - BUT you cannot add items to an order there, and I wanted to show that. Happy to do others now that I kind of am learning how. https://www.loom.com/share/2d1af2315687471ea0650da385787ff5
I think this large issue/project/epic will tackle this:
the database does not store taxes by line - when they are not included in price. So its a bigger project to create that stored data, rather than āsimplyā making sure it is pulled onto an invoice.
But Iām not 100% sure. I think @Rachel and @Jana might have a better understanding of the scope than me right now but you certainly make sense objectively to me but Iāll for sure need to see this process in play. Rachel is often able to show me and Jana how instance managers do processes like what you describe.
Thank you so much for the video! This is so so so helpful for us (design and product) to understand how real people use OFN for real cases! Iām over the moon! < Thatās the cow jumping over the moonā¦i hope thatās a reference people know haha!
Well - if you ever need more videos of real people doing real OFN stuff - Iām your person! I run a bunch of different shops for my own farm, a hub where flower farmers aggregate input orders so we get good pricing from big suppliers, and OFN-CAN manages orders for a large wholesale hub (the one in the demo).
work on the invoices is coming closer. I took the time to check what we would need to create legally compliant ones in Germany and after writing to @Rachel I wanted to post here for discussion.
There are actually three legally important things regarding taxes that we would like to ask to integrate:
Display tax rate per line item.
Display tax amount per tax rate.
Display explaining note if āno taxesā has been selected in admin.
You can find a spreadsheet with the current solution, the minimum solution, a good solution (see above) and a full solution here: Examples of invoices
Feel free to comment there, to add requirements that you may need or whatever comes to your mind.
We are chatting with @konrad on Slack and it could be that Germany is currently using the wrong invoice template as point 1 and 2 are correctly handled by the EU template (donāt know how to call it).
Point 3 has currently a workaround as each enterprise can set up a customized sentence to appear on invoices. But displaying a sentence when a company isnāt registered for tax is actually also a use case in France, maybe in other countries too.
This being said, users in France are also asking to add on invoices total amount excluding tax per tax rate. In the example Konrad has shared, it would add a total line of 12,60 for the 19% tax rate.
Thank you so much again for pointing us to the second template, @Rachel!
I can confirm that we have now switched to the EU template and it looks much better!
So the only requirement still open is now what you have described in your last paragraph:
The total amount excluding taxes per tax rate. See (1) in the modified example below again.
(2) has a workaround but would still be nice to have it automated for a simplified setup.
Just feel I need to pipe up with the reminder that in Canada (and I assume the US) invoices are still not legally compliant for 2 reasons. 1. line item taxes do not appear on either invoice template for countries where tax is excluded from prices. 2. They do not reflect changes made to the invoice ( this is an issue in the pipe). ( Iām just noting this because if we close an issue called āinvoices:tax compliableā - it could suggest that weāve met the requirement everywhere when we havenāt.)
so adding more scope to the amendments issues is maybe not the right way to go?
Apologies for the spam 
< Thatās the cow jumping over the moonā¦i hope thatās a reference people know haha!
I took the time to check what we would need to create legally compliant ones in Germany and after writing to 
