Make invoicing operations smooth and easy for hub managers and customers

Software improvement (Archived)
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1

What is the need / problem

  • It’s not possible to send multiple invoices for multiple orders at once
  • Jane needs to ask the hub to email her the invoices if she needs it, she doesn’t automatically receive it in her OFN account

Who does it impact

  • Mary / Shannon who do the invoincing operation
  • Jane / Mary who receives the invoice (from Mary or Shannon)

What is the current impact of this problem

  • Mary / Shannon: they need to generate manually one invoice by going into each order separately which is very time consuming
  • Jane: she can’t have an easy access to her invoices

What is the benefit in focusing on this

Time efficiency + easy access of invoices for customers

Links to more details

Potential solutions that will solve this problem

1- We can enable hub managers to mark an order / a bunch of orders as collected and then the invoice is automatically generated and attached to user account (and could be automatically sent by email if hub set that hub as a preference for instance)…
Pros: Jane will have easily access to her orders without asking it, and hub could decide if invoice is sent by email as well automatically when orders are marked as collected. No need to print invoices. Aligned with the direction taken with delivery note job.
Cons: it doesn’t enable Mary to print the invoices if she wants to, so will need anyway to implement some bulk actions on orders + marking a bunch of orders as collected will also need bulk actions to be implemented on orders so option 2 might be a better option as a first iteration (some first value added for little effort).

2- We can from bulk order management select multiple orders at once (add a multi-selector checkbox that you can thick after having applied fiters) and have a first action to “print invoices for selected orders” (later on we can add more actions like “send invoices by email for selected orders” or “mark selected orders as collected”…). That would for instance open one merged PDF with all invoices in it (but might take time to generate) that the hub manager can then print (I don’t think printing can be launched automatically without having one PDF that opens, can it?)
Cons: Jane still can’t really access easily her invoices, so less value probably than option 1 + Mary have to print if she wants to treat invoices by bulk (or we need to add action “send invoices for selected orders by email”)
Pros: but quicker to implement if we want just bulk invoice printing and bulk actions will be needed for other things so better value/effort rate probably

3- We generate a new report that creates a PDF to print?
Cons: sound strange in term of UX…

Do we have other feature candidates @Kirsten @sstead @sauloperez ? or shall we just do the value/map thing with those two?
Will we have to rewrite this with Spree upgrade? or can we do it NOW ?

2

@Kirsten just making a note that this is a feature request of Aus user (SF). How can we get this out of the icebox?

Also, would it be easier to implement a new report which prints a PDF with all invoices from a given OC?

3

I have made a note in the giant spreadsheet of love, row 57, that this is an Aus priority. When we come to voting for the next tranch of work (end June), you need to get in my ear and tell me how important it is and for whom :slight_smile:

4

The need really for me is not “print/send multiple order at once”, this is a feature candidate for a need that would rather be “Customers receive the invoice for their purchase without this operation being time consuming for hub manager”. Let’s always come back to the need…

5

So as we decided to prioritize that for Q3 I opened that epic: https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/issues/2396 we can discuss here and agree on the feature candidate we choose. Then I will then amend what I wrote on the epic and we can have a proper inception on the feature candidate we choose to list stories.

6

So first level of need discussed in this wishlist will be done in this icebox item: Enable quicker packing and invoicing that has been globally prioritized, we can see later on to work on other needs discussed in this wishlist.

7

Ok so it seems that the need expressed here is partially covered through the bulk invoice printing feature being implemented at the moment.
Another part of the need has been captured in the wishlist “Send invoices by email in bulk”.
The last bit that has not been covered is “Jane needs to ask the hub to email her the invoices if she needs it, she doesn’t automatically receive it in her OFN account” which can be connected to another need which is “Mary/Shannon still need to manually trigger invoicing, wether it be by sending invoices by email or by printing them”. I’ll open a new wishlist item to cover that new level of need, we can work on it later when we believe it becomes a priority. I have opened a specific wishlist for this need.

Also a comment on proposal 1: it is wrong, as invoicing can happen even before delivery happens, so we shouldn’t connected the order status (collected or not) with invoicing operation. Result of our discover work.

So this post can be closed and archived now.