Re: LedgerSMB companion projects (was: Light manufacturing modules....)

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

First of all, I charge more for my time than others.  I will contact
you off-list to make an offer.  However, I do charge more than many
other developers and would suggest that others who are interested in
doing these things also contact you off list as well :-)

I am willing to help these developers by providing brief (and provided
that it is not a lot of labor, free of charge) assistance in helping
prepare patches so that they are more likely to be accepted.

On 1/31/07, Ed W <..hidden..> wrote:
> > However, I do agree that we are too core-centric at the moment.  This
> > is largely because there isn't a huge degree of community assistance
> > in most of these areas at the moment.
>
> Going the other way - how much does it cost to sponsor a developer...
>
> Lets see some realistic charges to "buy" a feature.
>
> I have too little time and there are several main areas I would like to
> see developer (related)
>
> 1) Some improvements to the customer DB.  Not really a full CRM, but I
> want to be able to store cell phone, company, custom fields (in order to
> hook into a second private DB that we maintain with different data).  It
> would be nice to store company data so that I could group people by
> company reliably.  Also it would be nice to have a basic lead-tracker or
> ToDo system which would allow flexible notes against customers (even if
> this is external).  I also want to be able to use this DB as a
> datasource for other systems, eg lookup callerId with my asterisk
> system, and sync it with my email program addressbox, etc (external
> projects here - just want the datasource to be more robust to use as a base)

The basics of this will be in 1.3.  If you want to accellerate
development or backport it to the 1.2 branch (after that is released,
for your own use), I am sure one of us can provide a quote to you.

> 2) Some workflow hooks.  eg I regularly bill people airtime where I need
> to have their SIM card details handy for a recurring payment.  I want to
> be able to more easily program a button on a form which looks up the SIM
> number from past invoices, sets up a sales order, jumps me out to the CC
> screens to take payment and then sticks in a purchase order with our
> supplier to purchase the relevant airtime.  This same kind of
> passthrough processing no doubt applies to many business models?

Probably the best thing to do is talk specifically about what exactly
you need.  I can then help to break it out into appropriate hooks and
code specific to your business.

> 3) Invoices should store all the details so that they are unchangable.
> ie if I change the customer's address details then invoices should NOT
> change when I reprint them.  Same with VAT rates.

Agreed.  That may be a little while down the road unless it is
sponsored simply because we have a lot else that we have committed to
for 1.2 and 1.3.

> 4) CC integration - customers pass us their details - we will use a
> payment processor to enter the details and get an "instant confirm"
> back.  This should be filed and in future we can collect additional
> payments against this ref id simply by resubmitting a repeat payment
> against that ID.

1.2 has a credit card API framework.  We just need to hook it into
your UI and write a back-end driver for whatever you want to use.
Depending on your needs, this may not be too expensive.

> Number 4) is the one I want to work on first.  I use Protx and want to
> be able to more easily bill and re-bill customers.  ...How much and how
> soon can you deliver...

These are card-not-present transactions, right?  So we could use
another existing CC billing module to handle them if Protx is
supported....

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers