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2. Introduction

e-Bills is a server-side tool for generating bills or invoices to your clients. All of the PHP code, configuration files and documentation are available under the GNU GPL licence. e-Bills also includes a Billing Engine that supports more complex billing scenarios and provides some big productivity advantages.

From version 1.12 of e-Bills functions that were added that made the software much more of a customer management solution rather than just billing (although it does do billing very well). New features such as workflow, better reports and the ability to integrate closer with e-commerce enabled web sites has supported this and will continue to do so. Who knows at some point we may even create a new project to enhance this focus?

e-Bills was written with some strong design principals in mind:

e-Bills produces bills as Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF) or regulat HTML files for printing, faxing or emailing. These files are also archived, so that you can be sure of seeing the customer's copy when handling billing queries.

It is also useful for businesses that send out ad-hoc bills or invoices, and recently added some features to better support this. For regular bills though it brings some big (and automated) rewards.

2.1 What does e-Bills do?

e-Bills helps you manage your customers through the customer life cycle. It can integrate with your web site to capture customer details and interwork with your preferred secure payment system to capture order details. In addition the new workflow features can be used to ensure that you never forget to follow up on a web site query, support query, late payment or even order fulfillment. The system also allows you to email customers directly and to send the correspondence by regular mail or fax.

e-Bills become particularly powerful when integrated with your web site.

e-Bills creates bills (or invoices) for your business efficiently and allows you to send them to customers by post, email or fax and archives them for solving later billing queries. It provides any user on your LAN the possibility of using the system through their existing web browser. No more worries about configuring client PCs here!

e-Bills can also be used in an ASP-type environment to produces bills for multiple businesses from a single server.

It uses information that you or your employees have entered, allows them to view it, but more importantly it automates the task of bill-production for your customers. Bills are produced as PDF files.

2.2 What does it use?

The following components need to be installed on your server for e-Bills to operate:

There is also a Billing Engine currently available as a binary, which can be used to do an 'overnight' billing run or improve performance of the web side application. This is being released under the GPL.

2.3 What are its key features?

There's loads of features, we've tried to group them here:

Users

Bill format

Time saving

System

General

Products / services or items billed

2.4 Components

The following are the components of e-Bills:

2.5 New features

The release history for e-Bills is now at http://ebills.sourceforge.net

New features worth bragging about are:

Coming soon ...

  • Payments received listed in invoices

    • Please note this HOWTO often lags the development of new features due to resource available. To overcome this please feel free to visit http://ebills.sf.net and use the users mailing list to ask questions and get support.

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