Archive for October, 2008

Thursday, October 16th, 2008 / von Schorsch

You need multiple page pdf-invoices? The pdf-table-machine helps.

The KingPDF-TableMachine, that is how it exactly called, is responsible for the perfect allocation of tabular invoice-data across multiple pages. The TableMachine creates nearl y every kind of header or footer, administrates data-fields and manages the needed table-place over the different pages.

If it is an Invoice, an estimate or a Paymend-Reminder, the KingPDF-TableMachine needs to deal with many different unknown data but has to present a clean pdf-document.

That means if the SalesKing-User creates a pdf-document, we are not able to know:

  • how many data he uses: items of an invoice or estimate
  • how many columns are used: description, quantity, price…
  • how many headers or footers are used: carry over, delivery costs, total, subtotal
  • the used pdf-template: invoice-template, estimate-template, credit-note-template
  • changing pages within the template (page two differs from layout of page-one)

The process of creating a pdf-invoices does come to the user or developer some kind of trivial or easy job… it is…. If ALL of the above mentioned things are known BEFORE. But if you deal like this you’ve got restrictions and restrictions are the enemy of the SalesKing! The SalesKing does aspire liberty in document-design and layout. Two of his biggest enemy’s on his way are word-invoices or excel-templates.

If you now think: “But my word-invoice is payed in the past” we can just answer that word is not made to optimize your invoicing-workflow, even for 5, 100 or 10000 invoices… but that is another topic.

The dark side

… in most cases just seen by the developer  and in this special case I have had seen very much darkness before seeing the light. Now, everything is lighten up a bit, we are able to allocate very much items of payment-reminders, invoices, estimates with very less boundarys on very much pages.

As so often there is also a dark side at users-view, he has to learn how to work with his new opportunities. As we try to support this learning-process with some way-marking templates, everybody has a special-case to deal with at some time. And the management of these special-cases does the KingPDF-TableMachine.

Liberty in layout, design and multi-page

The new weapon of SalesKing, the KingPDF-TableMachine, tests every page 2-3 tmes with the real Invoice-items before it will be able to be printed. It is responsible for:

  • the allocation of invoice-items per page
  • carry-overs of each following page
  • sub-totals on the end of every page
  • no “alone”-standing totals on the last page
  • fitting of the items within the place-holder-box, not affected by the quantity of columns and rows within the item-list
  • overwriting of the footer-text (=normally unused place)
  • variable positioning of the invoice-items on every template page

If you are already SalesKing-User, you now will find some settings of the KingPDF-TableMachine on every template-setting-area:

Predefined Pdf-Templates (List)

Pdf-Templates-List

pdf-template table settings

Settings for table in pdf-template

You want to set the template more individual? Therefore you have to work on the Placeholder-Block “line_items”. If this says nothing to you yet, please read the other articles of the “KingPDF-Templates”-serie.

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Posted in Invoices, Templates | No Comments »

Saturday, October 4th, 2008 / von Schorsch

Recurring invoices

You need to create recurring invoices? No problem. SalesKing now has got the ability to create recurring invoices.

If you create invoices for example every week which go to the same recipient, you can now use the automatic invoice-replication. You can set the start and end-date of the repetition as you can set the recurring-intervall.

Intervall settings for recurring invoices

Detailed intervall settings for recurring invoices

If you do not set an end-date, the invoice will be repeated endless. At this time we do offer the following recurring-intervalls:

  • Daily
  • Weekly
  • Two-weekly
  • Monthly
  • Quarterly
  • Half-year
  • Year

To repeat an invoice, first click on invoices then recurring invoices. At this step you can create a new recurring invoice.

how to create new recurring invoices

recurring invoices list-view

You can also copy existing recurring invoices to create a new one. Until yet it is not possible to change the recipient or to add multiple recipients.

You can also create an recurring invoice out of an existing “normal” invoice. Therefore you can find on detail-sight of every invoice the menu-point recurring.

More options for the recurring-invoices are planned. If you have got special needs, you are welcome to leave a comment as description of these.

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Posted in Invoices | No Comments »

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 / von Schorsch

Freedom of movement: work on pdf-templates with acrobat

As mentioned in the first article in our KingPDF-Templates-series, I will now explain the customization of your SalesKing-Templates with placeholders. Let’s step in immediately:

You have created a invoice-design in your favourite graphic-software and now want to use it in the SalesKing. After Exporting it as pdf and re-opening in your Adobe-Professional (with the Block-Plugin) your template is ready… o.k. … nearly ready. The SalesKing, of course has to know where he should write the data you want to have in your invoice (Invoice-number, invoice-items….). Now we come back to the articles-header, because a really flexible template-system needs to deal with two keyfeatures:

  1. Freedom of movement while placing the placeholders
  2. Many and mostly: intelligent datafields

Let’s get in touch with the first feature now, the other one I will reflect in the next article of the series.

Freedom of movement with blocks

The called placeholder-blocks in the pdf-template will be filled with real data while creating the pdf-document. The SalesKing does identificate the while reading their names and does deliver the needed data. The creating-process of the pdf-documents in SalesKing does the, among experts well known, PDFLib with the Personalization Server (PPS). Within the PPS there is the Acrobat Block-Plugin, which gives the ability to work with, create, copy, the ex- or import of placeholder-blocks. As followed, you can see a screenshot of a invoice-template. You can see the blocks with their red-marked names and on the second page you can see a block-dialog for the marked adress-field.

Within SalesKing the Blocks are also shown in the pdf-settings oft he pdf-templates. Here another template:

In your document, you can place Blocks on every position you want. Additional every block does have settings which do define the formatting of the letter printed text. There are so many opportunity’s to customize your template, theresor I will just mention them shortly:

  • Text: font/clour/hight/flow/alignment
  • Colour: outline/filling/text
  • Type of block: text/picture/pdf
  • For every block-tpe special options

All of that is until yet not really magical, but I have to say that I wonder I did not now it until yet. But we would not be SalesKing if we are not done with these customization-tools. That is why we decided to pimp our blocks.

“We do have customized blocks”

In the above mentioned options I did not refer to these two:

  • SalesKing defined custom fields
  • Blocknames with special meanings

Here you can see the propertys of the block field “notes_after” with a custom field:

Every Block can contain this special field “show on page” – it does manage (as you can imagine) on which page of the document the block is shown. This field is made for multi-page documents and can contain three different settings:

  • First – the block will only show up at first page
  • Last – the block will only show up at last page
  • 2 – the number of the page where the block should show up

As you might noticed, we do allow multiple pages per tamplate or printed document. A multiple-page pdf therefore does need a intelligent page numbering. This does provide our Blocknames with special meanings. One of these is the “page_number”-Block:

Within the page_number-Block you can format the ouput oft he page-numbers as you want. In the example the are set to show “Page 2 of 3”.

Multi-Page-Invoices + Multi-Page-Templates = Problem

…not for the SalesKing, because a new pdf will be created page by page from the template. If the created pdf does have more pages as the used template provides, the last template-page will be used for all following-pages. Hard to imagine? A Example:

You create a pdf, with many items, over three pages and you use a two-page-template.

For the first page, the first template page will be used, and the block “notes_after” won’t be shown as pictured above. Just to say it again: His unused place will be used automatically. The following two pages will be generated from the following template-page. The allocation of the invoice-items, as the settings of sub-totals and carry-overs will be proceed automatically. Of course the “notes_before”-, and the “notes_after”-Block of the second page will be overwritten.

Sounds quite simple and will be seen as Standard from professional Users, but the most Invoicing-Tools does not support such features. Maybe we do distend with that, but if you ever was in the situation to create documents with more than one page, you will know what I am talking about.

Not enough liberty yet? Read in the next KingPdf-article:

  • Breakdown of items on multiple-pages

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Posted in API, Estimates, Invoices, Reminders, Templates | No Comments »