How to "Raise an invoice" using Organise for OSX

"How do I raise an invoice" is a frequently asked question.

Many people use that phrase to describe what they do when a new customer places an order or asks them to do something.

In Organise, there isn't a button that says 'Raise an invoice', but the 'Order' is the form that holds all of the information about such a transaction. It has a sequential reference number (order number/invoice number) it holds the billing and/or delivery addresses, the items or services that the customer has ordered and finally it generates the paperwork (invoice / delivery note / whatever) using all of that information

So New Order is what you're looking for (either the toolbar button, File > New > Order or the plus button underneath the list of Orders). Then fill in all the details. This can be done very quickly and if you've done everything properly, generating paperwork and generating reports and accounts will be a cinch.

If you don't like the term 'Order' then you can go to Preferences > Terms and change it to 'Sale', 'Transaction', 'Job' or whatever else you like.

I'd suggest avoiding switching it to 'Invoice' because in Organise, the 'Invoice' is a record of an invoice that you have received. (these feed into the 'Money out' section of your accounts). Plus, the invoice is something you generate from that Order.

Besides this quick video there's a more comprehensive step-by-step tutorial here.

Organise v8 - ready for business

Shiela calling Orson...

It's been a milestone day today. After much hard work, a new version of small-business app Organise (v8) is tested, in real-life use here in the PM HQ and available to users as a release candidate.

Following a survey last year, some frequently-requested features are now built-in; address label printing, email list export, time logging. I'm not a fan of Yosemite's completely bare and flat look (to say the least) but Organise has had its interface tweaked a little and I like the cleaner look.

Version 8 is not only about features within the app. The .dmg now contains two other apps, the Report Builder tool, and Announce, a tool to send out bulk emails individually via your Apple Mail client.

Also accompanying the new version and gone live today is a User Forum.

organise.forumatic.com is intended to replace the support form, the FAQs page and maybe even the manual. It would be great to see users discussing issues and ideas between themselves. Bugs and issues posted there will be answered quickly and publicly which will be helpful to others and the 'How do I...?' section will eventually build up into a useful knowledge base.

This will be Organise's year. The user forum will help to shape Organise and the next major project on the list is an iPad checkout interface, either standalone or as a companion for Organise.

Shiela signing out. Nanu Nanu.

Printing customer address labels from Organise

Following a recent survey to find out which feature(s) users were looking for in Organise, the small business app has gained label printing functionality.

The simplest way to use this is to select from your contacts list by choosing a category or typing a keyword in the search box. (Or just print them all).

The built-in report called 'Current customers' will list all customers for orders with an incomplete status.

For more advanced searches such as "Billing contacts for orders still unpaid" or "Billing contacts for orders placed within certain date range" it'll be necessary to use Reports and Organise's  special Report Builder tool. (I'm always happy to help with this).

Rather than attempt to offer a list of presets for label sizes and layouts, Organise has a few boxes for things like padding around the labels and page margins (and obviously the number of labels on the page). I've tried to keep this as simple as possible but being able to print onto any page of sticky labels.

For email campaigns, the new Announce app will send individual emails using Apples Mail app using a list of email address (and optionally names etc for merging). You can generate the mailing list from Organise using Reports, but in the near future I'm hoping to merge this functionality into Organise and make it simple to use.

The new version of Organise containing the label printing functionality is in testing but not released yet. If you'd like to test it, please contact support@peacockmedia.co.uk

Importing sales from Squarespace or Paypal into Organise

This tutorial requires Organise version 7.2.2 or higher.

(At time of writing this version is currently available from Organise's home page, soon from other download websites and from the Mac App Store after Apple's approval.)

First you'll need to obtain your data in csv format from your provider.

You'll find a new menu item - File > Import > Special.

Choose squarespace or paypal as appropriate.

There are two paypal imports because for reasons unknown I've seen two different formats from Paypal. Either try each menu item in turn and see which works best, or preview your csv and check whether the customer address is in one field with commas separating (paypal) or the parts of the address are in separate columns (paypal2)

Organise will attempt to import the information; for each line in the csv it will create:

• an Order
• Billing and Delivery Contacts if the information is in the csv. If a Contact with the same name and postcode exists already, Organise will not duplicate it but link to the existing one.
• an Item in your inventory if an Item with the same item number doesn't exist already
• a payment on the Order for the amount paid

Although the Orders list will be behind the Open file dialog, you may be able to see whether the expected information is in the columns. If something looks wrong or you know you've made a mistake, you'll be able to click 'Doesn't look right' to abandon the import. Otherwise press OK to continue. (You can of course later select the imported information and delete it if you need to).

Note that the new Orders will bear a transaction ID (known in Squarespace as the Payment Reference) displayed opposite Organise's own reference number. This isn't editable (but you can select and copy it) so you have a permanent reference to the original Squarespace / Paypal transaction. It also allows Organise to avoid importing the same record again if you try to import the same file again or import another file containing overlapping information.

Getting started with Organise - Creating an order, generating the invoice / delivery note

Here's how to enter the details of an order into Organise and generate paperwork in just a few clicks.

The process is very similar if using the 'checkout' (point of sale) interface.

1. Click the 'New Order' button or use File > New > Order or cmd-N

2. Add a title and select a status

3. Click the 'Billing' tab.  For an existing customer (or if you're not sure whether it's an existing customer) click 'Select Contact' and search for their name, postcode, whatever.  For a new customer, click 'New Contact' and paste in their details.  You can use the 'Paste' button to paste the whole name and address into the separate fields.

4. If the delivery address is the same as the billing one, skip to 5.  Otherwise repeat 3 in the Delivery tab.

5. If the items ordered are already in your inventory ('Items') then select them using the 'Select from Items' button.  Otherwise you can add an item 'Adhoc'. (which will not add the item to your Items list).

6. Click through to the 'Financial details' tab. Press the 'Calculate' button to add up the total of the order.   Enter a shipping amount if applicable. If the full amount has been paid, click 'Tender full amount'.  You can enter a part-payment using 'Add payment'

7. Choose a template (you may like to customise the templates first - use 'Edit Templates'). Click 'Generate' to put the Order details into the chosen Template.  You can print this or save as pdf for emailing or to keep a copy. If you press the 'Save PDF' button, the pdf will be attached to the order, find it by clicking back to the 'Details' tab.

8. Use other templates (you can create your own) to generate other paperwork - delivery note for example.

Categorising your items in Organise

Organise v7.1 adds categories to Items. Items can be in one or more categories, or none. If you don't need to use categories then just ignore the categories box and all will work as before.

1. Categorising your items

You can type a category into individual items. For more than one category, separate using a comma:  

Alternatively, you can set the category for more than one item by selecting them (hold down shift to select more than one item in the table, use the search box to find your items, ctrl-click or right-click to call this context menu): 

Note that you can  remove multiple items from a category using the same method. To remove a category completely, choose it from the Filter box, select all items in the list and use the Remove menu item.

2. Using categories

The filter drop-down box will contain all the categories that you have entered. Simply select a category to see all items in that category. Alternatively you can type the category into the search box:

When adding an Item to an Order, you can type a category into the search box:

Reports that work on your inventory can now be tweaked to select items from a category:

Organise Report Builder Tutorial - getting started

This tutorial is to help you get started with Report Builder for Organise, a free app which is included in the .dmg for Organise Pro version 6.2, available very shortly.

If you work through this tutorial with me, you'll understand how to create and save a report, how to select records to appear in your report and create some columns.

This simple example report will display a list of all items in your database which have a quantity of zero or less.

1. Open the Report Builder application. It'll be ready to start creating a new report

2. Choose to 'Select from' Items

3. Press Add to add a selection criteria ('Where'). Choose 'qty' as the field name, 'is less than' for the operator and type '1' as shown here. (We need to say 'less than one' because Organise Reports don't currently offer 'equals or less than'. If you know that no items have a negative quantity then you could say 'equals 0'). OK that.

4.  Press Add to add a column. Choose 'Item name' as the heading, 'item' as the field and 400 as the width. OK that and then add another with 'Qty' as the heading, 'qty' as the field and 100 as the width. OK that. You can adjust the widths now if you like, and even re-order them by drag-and-drop.

This is what the report looks like so far:

5. Choose File>Save (or cmd-S) and name your report 'Out of stock items'. OK that.

6a. If you're on Organise Pro version earlier than 6.2, quit Organise if it's running and then open it again. You should see your new report in the Reports list. Run it to check that it works.

6b. If you're on Organise Pro v6.2 onwards, just press 'Run' (or File > Run Report or cmd-R) to update Organise with your new report and run it.

7 Once the report is run, note that you can sort the columns by clicking on the headers. You can also export in a number of formats such as .csv to open it in a spreadsheet application.

In progress

I've been thinking about adding graphing functionality to Organise's report manager for a long time.

Having written some graph-drawing code for currency-tracking application MoneyTrends, I had classes that I could use here. It's been fun helping this along from the imagination to the screen.

Internationalisation! ( -zation?)

Like almost all of my software, I wrote Organise to fill my own needs and still use it heavily myself.

Occasionally someone has contacted me about problems with calculations if their system preferences are set to format numbers differently from here in the UK (for example, if they're in a country using a comma as a decimal separator and dot '.' as a thousand separator).

But I've never gone through the app and made sure that Organise works perfectly regardless of user number formats. The same thing applies to the sales tax rate (for example, Canada apparently has three different taxes, which Organise hasn't been able to handle).

I had a wake-up call when Organise was put on offer on a popular download site recently. Why people buy software without taking advantage of a free trial I don't know, but they apparently do, and it's very awkward when they find that it doesn't work for them.

It has been a tough task. The code behind Organise is vast now and there are many places where it makes calculations and needs to take account of the user's choice of number format. But I'm just about there.

And to complete a truly international version (version 6!), I've also tried to add the flexibility that's needed for folks to calculate their sales tax wherever they are. Defaults are in line with the UK rules, but as you can see here it's now as customisable as I think it needs to be.

I hope to have a release candidate ready for download in the new year.