DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN ELECTRONIC INVOICING SYSTEM. A RESEARCH PROJECT MATERIAL ON COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
The internet, without doubt, has played an important role in digitalizing business processes across companies and organizations of all sizes. It has introduced multiple new channels through which businesses can interact with their customers [1]. A report by Gartner, an Information Technology (IT) research institution, reveals that 70% of all customer interactions will move towards digital, more interactive settings and would be experienced on demand through mediums such as web, mobile and social media platforms by 2017. The generation of today understands technology more than ever and require services delivered as quickly as possible, whenever and wherever they desire [2].
To achieve all these, companies do not have to make huge capital investments by purchasing and maintaining software licenses for applications like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Inventory Management System (IMS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and installing them on individual hardware on the business premises [3]. They can instead contain costs, deploy solutions quicker and minimize risk by using this Electronic Invoicing System hosted by a third party and delivered over the internet , Its purpose is to bring an inexpensive and easy solution to the business operation needs of customers especially the Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). The system allows businesses to create and send computerized invoices to their customers [4].
STATEMENT OF PROBLEM
During the analysis and data collection of this project, it was discovered that there existed a manual form of collecting and storing customers’ invoices in other for them to be attended to, and for future purpose [5].
That is to say that the process of daily task and activities are done manually which is quite unfortunate; manual procedural execution produced delays in writing down all the customer bought, at some instances the business owner can’t keep a proper record of the goods and services sold out in a particular day, week or Month, which reduces result in businesses.
Manual invoicing record keeping has resulted in many setbacks to the expected standard. The setback encountered includes:
Time wastage in writing down everything bought by some customers.
Partial or total loss of invoice by both business and customers.
Under recording of invoice analysis.
Inefficiency of some members of staff due to laziness in searching of the invoice.
As a result of these problems, the manual system of invoice record information storage, input and retrieval is very clumsy: inefficient and unbelievable.
PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
To develop a computerized Electronic Invoicing software to carryout tedious work and activities performed by human beings, in which they end up misplacing and discarding some important files and costumers records. But if this (computerized Invoicing software) is implemented and installed it will render remedy to this case.
AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
The main aims and objectives of the system are:
To design a web based invoicing system to replace some extent of human role in cases of unavailability of job.
To provide quick retrieval of customer’s invoice records on site or case of loss of original invoice.
Also, the purpose of this software is to model a computerized invoice system to enable proper invoice generating for customers and control this records.
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