Overview of e-Bills

Create invoices as PDF files e-Bills runs from a Linux server (which can also be used for a million and one other things) on your Local Area Network. Users gain access via their existing web-browser. This means you don't have to install any software on user PCs and the software is instantly accessible to everyone in your business. We've thoughtfully added usernames and passwords which give different privileges to different users.

Within e-Bills you can define customers, products, contracts and charges. All of these are stored within a high performance SQL database. Records can be viewed and modified at any time. Customers can have any number of contracts assigned to them. When sales are made then products or services are added to the contracts. Then, at pre-specified times (or manually) bills are produced and printed.

Bills are produced in a PostScript® compatible format and as Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF) files (the latter are archived and can be viewed at any time). Samples

For more operational information please see the Billing-with-e-bills-HOWTO.

We welcome feedback on this product - please use our contact form.

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Background

e-Bills utilises the well-known Linux operating system and a number of related services to proviide a highly reliable multi-user environment. By their very nature, applications based around html are multi-user. It also means that the applications use very robust and proven technology.

The use of PHP (a scripting language used for many web sites) provides the perfect means to generic html pages based upon the current user environment or database contents. We also use portions of javascript to provide some rather nice features too.

The key components of e-Bills are:

• A web-enabled front-end written in PHP, html and JavaScript
• Database
• A Billing Engine written in C
• Text processing capability
• The installation and configuration scripts
• Documentation

It uses

• A Linux server (we use Red Hat Linux 6.1 or above)
• Web Server (Apache 1.3.9 or above)
• PHP scripting language with embedded html (version 4 or above)
• The MySQL Open Source Database (version 3.22 or above)
• The LaTeX text processing language (TeTeX HOWTO)
• Ghostscript

The e-Bills HOWTO contains installation and configuration information for all of these.

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