[Gnumed-devel] Billing/invoicing for GNUmed - the road ahead

[Sebastian Hilbert]

Hi all,

That was the easy part I am afraid. The information provided and the tests 
done indicate a wide range of possibilities when it comes to implementing 
this.

We are at a stage where billing a client is not that far off. The minute 
billing becomes a possibility user uptake will increase. In my view GNUmed is 
not prepared for that. To succeed this whole billing stuff needs a dedicated 
coder. I am not talking fulltime or even paid but someone who puts in the 
effort to getting this going.

This is a call on everyone willing to step up. Even if you are just starting 
with coding. You can do it. You will have a learning curve but you can do it. 
If noone steps up things will stay the way they are. I assume that Karsten 
will help out advancing this to a point where a shell script exists taking 
care of

1.) calling lx-office with a list of parameters
2.) fetching a pdf file and putting it into GNUmed

Someone else needs to do this:

1.) Think up how to present the billing stuff to the user inside GNUmed
2.) check if Lx-Office works for non-German users as well
3.) craft the command line that needs to be sent to Lx-Office
4.) Check if these commands work for sql-ledger as well
5.) maintain these commands as Lx-Office/sql-ledger might change over time
6.) optional - tackle gmBilling


Re gmBilling. This could be an abstraction wrapper that protects GNUmed from 
changes in Lx-Office. It would translate calls from GNUmed such as 
gmBilling.newcustomer(custid=4,address=foo) into ct.pl .bin/mozilla&action=foo
This however is left to the person implementing this.

To speed things up I would assume money comes into play. There will be 
companies looking at creating this GNUmed-Ledger interface. Noone knows if 
they are going to do it for free.

I would like to discuss this here and solicit input on how this can be handled 
best. Leave it to companies ? Fundraising ? Pledges for payment upon 
completion ?

Best regards,
Sebastian