Module to Group Orders Under 1 Invoice #

Question

I'm interested in creating a billing module to generate monthly bills for my business customers (Not the same as recurring billing!).

I'm using both a website and regular in store POS, which is connected to magento. When a business registers as a customer, they are allowed to order goods in store or online and receive them without paying upfront. At the end of each month, a bill is generated showing all the customer orders; the date each was ordered, items ordered, the price and total due to be paid.

I was able to allow the business customer group to place orders without paying by using an extension that allows me to set a specific payment method for a specified customer group (in this case business).

NEEDS: Now the next part of the puzzle is to find a way to generate a pdf for each business customer, displaying their account information, orders place within that month and the total due to be paid. This can then be printed or emailed to each customer.

I have searched high and low for an extension that is at least close to what i need, but i was unsuccessful in finding one.

Current Magento Process

As you can see, with the current Magento system an invoice and shipment has to be created for each order.

SOLUTION: I believe 1 solution could be to group each business customers orders under 1 invoice# each month, so i can generate that one invoice showing the array of order items for that period. after which a new invoice# will be assigned for the new month, which that months orders will be grouped under, repeating the process.

Illustration

so essentially, when a business customer places an order, it will automatically do the invoicing placing the order under that months invoice number. at the end of that month the bill is generated and sent to the business, when payment is received, the shipping process is done to completing the process.

Is this a solution/workflow that will work within the magento system or do i need to come up with another solution?

any help will be appreciated. Thanks...

Answer 1

I think that a good solution could be to use an external instrument to make invoices.

Why?

Because there are a lot of magento methods that assume that an invoice could be related only to a single order like.

$invoice->getOrder()

This function exists in a lot of methods and assume that value is not a collection (invoice obj or false). Asking this question before start to develop has been very cleaver before to get the road to the hell!

Rewriting all these methods could be very frustrating!

I suggest you to evalutate an other system to send invoice with a cron and a REST/API sending every month order by customer and disable in your frontend any relation to the invoice (email sending and download in customer area).

Answer 2

The solution would be to create a new invoice type, called something like 'group invoice'.

This group invoice can include all invoices in one PDF file, an show a total for all invoices on the first page.

That way there's no need to rewrite existing Magento functionality, but you can still let customer easily send all invoices at once with a simple overview for easy payment.

Is this an idea maybe?