[Tiki-devel] Tiki Invoice & Tiki Time Sheet, planning

[Robert P. <rob...@gm...>]

Hey Guys,
I know you haven't seen any commits yet for tiki invoice, we are still
planning, and I've been swamped with tons of projects, but I will start on
it soon.  That being said, Marc brought up an interesting point last week in
a discussion we had.  We need a way to re-bill items.  In the past I think I
talking about a "re-invoice-able" feature (I might have used the term
"rebillable", but in an effort to keep the names concise).  Well this would
be another facet of the tiki invoicing system.

This of coarse is subject to change, but feel free to comment on how we
should proceed, because this will be something that is going to affect the
entire tiki team of contractors.

Tiki Invoice will be a system we can use to send invoices, cake right?
Tiki Time Sheet will be how we track our time, again, cake...

So-far-so-good.... Now here is where it gets interesting...
We need a re-invoice-able feature.  What that essentially will be is
functionality to be able to receive invoice items from 1 invoice, and send
them through to another completely different invoice.  We in a since,
re-send the invoice item.  But how do we send it?  Ah ;).

We tossed around a few ideas, rss seems like to much work, so I through out
the idea about using email.  The email itself would have syntax used just
like a wiki page and plugins to boot.  The data would be securely handled in
a similar way that wiki pages are, only without all the html handling.  So
you would create your invoice, then send it either as a pdf or a tiki
invoice message to a fellow tiki-er, and it would then be parsed as it
enters their inbox and is confirmed as a tiki invoice email using imap.  The
invoice would then be handled in the same way a wiki plugin is parsed, only
for email plugins (which don't exist yet).  We could detect the line item,
the qty, the description, and it would auto create a new invoice, or append
to existing.

It seems like a pretty solid idea, this would also open up a field of new
inter-communication for tiki, through email where 1 to 1 or 1 to few makes
since.  Where wiki = many to many.
I'm just tossing around ideas, but if we are going to build this thing
right, we should start now.  What do you guys think?
-- 
Robert Plummer