Quote, Order, Invoice Process Question

[michaelzer]

I have been testing the work flow, from processing quotes to receiving payments and I have come across two errors. 

This is my process:

I create a quote with a few line items on it. 
Payment plan is set to "Deposit plus user defined"
Customer clicks to accept the quote items.
Customer selects Pay Offline to pay the deposit ("Payment is Required" is set to "Yes")
There is a warning on the front end stating that the quote will not be enacted until payment is received.
In the back-end I click on the "awaiting payment" icon in the Quotes summary.  This opens a window to enter in the payment.
I enter in a payment of 40% as if the customer had sent me a check for the deposit.
When the deposit payment is recorded, an order and invoice are automatically created.
When I check in the front-end, the invoice states "Part Paid" and the payment details appear on the invoice.

1st error:  When I click on the "Pay this Invoice" button in the front end invoice summary, it states "Invoice #0012 has already been paid. You cannot pay it again!"

In the middle of writing this, I went back to check all my settings and discovered that the nominal ledger amount was incorrect.  When I clicked on the "awaiting payment" icon, the payment screen opened with the amount already populated with the total, NOT the deposit amount.  When I changed this amount to the deposit amount, the value in the nominal ledger did not change, it remained at the full amount.  This caused the invoice to appear paid by nbill even though there was a balance due still showing on the frontend.

2nd error:  The above process was attempted with "Auto-create Invoice" set to "No", as this is my desired operation.  When I click the "awaiting payment" icon in the quote summary backend, I get an error message that states "NBILL_QUOTE_NO_INVOICE_GENERATED".

I would like to be able to create a quote which will require a 40% deposit to accept.  Once the payment is received, I want to auto create the orders (I will be calling them work orders).  I will edit the order status to "to be scheduled", "scheduled", "in progress", "completed", or whatever, as the work is being completed.  Then, upon completion (or upon a good amount of progress for larger jobs), I will issue an invoice for the remaining payment (or progress payment).  I do not want to issue an invoice up-front, because accepting the deposit at the quote stage is acceptable.  I do not want my customers to get the "an invoice has been created" message and I don't want the invoice to be available until the work is completed (or partially completed).

Is there any way to accept a deposit for a quote without auto-creating an invoice?

[netshine]

1st error: Automatically adjusting the nominal ledger values is not possible because there can be numerous ledger codes involved, and nBill has no way of guessing what the breakdown should be. However, it is supposed to warn you if you try to save an income record and the total ledger amount does not match the income total - did you not get a warning message when you tried to save the income?

2nd error: I will have to run through that and see if I can re-create the problem - it certainly shouldn't show a constant in place of an error message like that.

nBill works on the assumption that whenever you charge someone for something, you should provide them with an invoice. I don't think it would be possible to take a deposit without generating an invoice (well, it might be possible - for example, by deleting the invoice as soon as it is created in an event folder script - but would lead to problems further down the line, such as when the balance needs to be paid and there is no invoice for it).

[netshine]

Have been looking into the 2nd error you mentioned, and I think the only problem is that the warning message was not displayed (this is because I defined the placeholder for the message but neglected to actually write the message in the language file). If auto create invoice is set to 'no', recording the income is aborted because there is no invoice to tie it up to. The correct warning message will be displayed in the next release, but if you want to update it in the meantime, just add the following to the end of the /administrator/components/com_nbill/language/en-GB/quotes.en-GB.php file:

//Version 2.1.1
define("NBILL_QUOTE_NO_INVOICE_GENERATED", "An invoice could not be generated for this quote. As a result, the quote status has been updated (pending items are now marked as accepted), but the receipt has not been recorded. You may need to create invoice and/or income records manually for this transaction.");

[michaelzer]

1st error:  I went back in and tried it again and I got the error message.  I don't know how I missed that the first time!

2nd error:  I see.  I will have to ammend my process to either

  a.) do not require payment to accept a quote, auto create orders only, generate invoice when the deposit is due.

  b.) require payment to accept a quote and auto create orders and invoices

Thank you for including the information about the error message, I will just leave it as it is because it doesn't really affect anything.

Thanks for your fast reply.