Bare Naked App

A really important part of building a web app is determing how billing/invoicing will work, and how that integrates with your accounting software. We use QuickBooks so we have to integrate DropSend and Amigo with it.

The above photo is Nick (our accountant), Mo (our bookkeeper) and me talking about how Amigo invoices and payments will be imported into QuickBooks. Here’s how we’re going to do it:

• Amigo uses the Secure Trading API to charge Advertiser’s credit card
• Amigo sends out HTML email invoices to Advertisers
• Amigo spits out invoice data to an Excel sheet which is automatically emailed to our bookkeeper
• Our bookkeeper uses a custom program (written in VB) that imports that Excel sheet and creates invoices in QuickBooks
• Amigo uses the Paypal API to pay the newsletter owners
• Our bookkeeper logs into Paypal and downloads the record of transactions in Excel format
• Our bookkeeper uses a custom program (written in VB) that imports that Excel sheet and creates receipts in QuickBooks

We’re all moved into our new office (with shiny new desks and everything) and Amigo is back on the conveyor belt. Here’s a quick tour of our office and Ryan to give you an update on the latest issue with PayPal.

RSS readers, view the video here.

Amigo is a tricky beast as we’re not only accepting payments, we’re also paying people. Here’s how it works:

1. Person A pays Carson Systems (Amigo) with their credit/debit card. We use Secure Trading’s XPay module to do this.
2. Carson Systems generates an invoice (marked paid) and emails it to Person A
3. The money goes into Carson Systems’ bank account
4. Carson Systems uses the PayPal API to pay Person B

The last step is the really tricky one. Watch the video to see how we solved it!

RSS readers, view the video here.