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nBill is a component for the Mambo and Joomla Content
Management Systems. Mambo and Joomla are free open source
CMSs which can be used to manage the content of your website.
nBill adds further functionality to Mambo or Joomla to enable you to
manage financial transactions, orders, and invoicing for your
business, and to offer products and services for sale online using
order forms that you can build yourself.
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At present, there is no standalone version of nBill available - you have to already have either
Mambo or Joomla installed. A standalone version is planned for a future release.
You do not have to sell products online to make use of nBill – it can be used to record
transactions of offline sales and subscriptions as well as for e-commerce. It is especially
useful for subscriptions or recurring payments for which invoices need to be generated on a
regular basis.
The intention is that this component will provide you with all of the features you need to
manage all of your business bookkeeping – at the end of your fiscal year, you can then just
hand over the records to your accountant (either by giving him/her access to your installation
of nBill, or by printing off the necessary reports about your transactions).
What it is not
Note: nBill is currently not like a typical e-commerce system. It has a greater
than normal
emphasis on bookkeeping (eg. it has features for recording income and expenditure of all
sorts, not just your online trade) - which is lacking in many e-commerce packages. It is also not a fully-fledged accounting package - just a low-budget online billing system (although it does provide some reports which might be useful to your accountant in preparing your annual accounts).
At present it also does not provide a typical 'online shop'. There is no shopping cart,
and you cannot browse products online. Products can be ordered and paid for online, by
means of order forms that you can customise. This makes nBill particularly appropriate for
certain types of business - either those with only a few products, or those that provide
services or subscriptions rather than typical consumer goods.
A more typical shopping cart system might be added at a later date, but at present the system
is intended to fill a gap in the market for a comprehensive billing and bookkeeping system. If
you need a shopping cart, try VirtueMart.
