My much anticipated free web-based administration system will be coming online in a beta run very soon!
The admin system is part of my free Apli collection and will serve to promote my skills as a web application concept/designer/developer and also as a free and MUCH BETTER alternative to the commercial products out there (often costing around 25 euros/month and, to be honest, pretty terrible). Like most my aplis the goal is to show off 
so the admin includes many features not usable for everyone. You should know however that when developing for a specific client I always take the less-is-more approach! I do not provide functions that are of NO use to the client and only serve to confuse!
To poke the fires of interest here is an overview of what can be expected in the Beta version (0.3). This is basically a list of the menu items starting from home and ending with settings. I might be more logical to start reading from the bottom..
Overview: This is the homepage, it provides a quick overview of open invoices and quotes, incoming birthdays, hosting/domains soon to be terminated or extended, projects nearing their hour cap, projects nearing their deadline and statistics for the current year.
Employees: Overview of all employees, freelancers, partner companies etc. pretty much anyone that works for you. you can manage their profile, view what projects they are working on or have worked on, the hours they have spent on projects, calculations for their pay based on hourly price x hours worked, sick days/holidays and calculations for what they have earned you from clients.
Clients: overview of all clients, contact persons, manage profile, quotes/invoices/projects/hosting accounts/domains for this client, income from client, % of total income client has provided this year,
Quotes: In this first beta this will be a simple quote system, add products/services, get a total and email pdf to financial contact of client, in following releases this will be expanded to a full planning system. Part automating the creation of a document with a full planning schedule with dates, calendar overview, workers, etc. You can export each quote to a project and multiple invoices when the client accepts it.
Invoices: overview, create/manage invoices, pdf generation and direct emailing to financial contact person. Overview of totals and taxes per month/year.
Projects: overview and manage projects, set types, connect employees and set their hour cap for the project, overview of hours spent, project costs and project turnover/profit. warning when hour cap is being reached, warning when deadlines are being reached.|
Costs: here you can enter all company costs, basically all the receipts, also allows you to add a scan of the receipt for administration purposes. shows totals, tax overviews, and calculations.
Cash: for those companies who still do much with cash a separate registration of incoming and outgoing cash amounts.
Driving: for companies with a company car that need to do kilometer registration for administration or tax purposes.
Hosting: for companies in the web industry, allows company to keep a list of hosting accounts on their or other servers, with package details, login/password and remarks. I will not include this in the free apli but I also have a system for auto creation of accounts on specific types of web servers and managing account settings from within the admin system.
Domains: also for web industrycompanies. Tracking of domains registered for clients, with expiration dates, cancellation options etc. Also not included in the free apli the option to communicate directly with your domain provider via an api to register/update/cancel domains and your webserver to attach said domain to an account.
Products: these are your company's products, these can be items or services. Name, description, price can be entered for each one but also options for work hours, the amount of time to provide this service or develop this product, and planning hours, this can be the same as the work hours but often more time should be used in a planning than the actual work hours to take travel time, error margins, etc into account.
Settings: here each user can customize the system to their needs. You can enter your company information, logo, letter footer but also the name of your local tax (VAT in the UK, BTW in Holland, etc) and the percentages of tax available for invoices and for costs.
Next to this quite full administration system there are also 3 more importent parts:
1. The daily automation and check. This checks all databases daily and sends various statistics and info to the system admin. on the 4th of each month it will send an overview of all hours worked in the previous month by employees, it will also send a financial overview that can be directly forwarded to your accountant. Daily there is a check on domains that will expire or will need to be deleted, upcoming employee birthdays, system backup and cleaning of empty clients/invoices/items/etc.
2. Worker login. Where the employee/freelance/partner can manage their own profile (with confirmation to the admin) and enter their work hours into the projects that they are working on.
3. Client login. Where the clients can manage their own profile (with confirmation to the admin), view all their quotes, invoices, hosting accounts, domains and projects. They can give an online accept to a quote (online signature). Not in the free apli but can be made: online payment options for invoices. Clients can also view the hours currently worked on their project (If this has been enabled in settings).
This is all planned for the beta 0.3 release sometime soon, depending on my other (paid) projects, but I do hope to launch it before the end of June! I have several more ideas for next releases but welcome ANY suggestions people may have! Note that the beta release will NOT be HTTPS, or at least not with a paid certificate so you may get warnings about unsecure https certificate.. the final release will be proper https though!
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