Billing for small businesses and freelancers

In Writing

The software bundles the accumulated transactions in the Operations group. Here you will find all the relevant forms from quotation to invoicing that are required in business transactions. A journal function is also implemented, which provides a quick overview of business performance during a period that you can select. An output table in the Operations group can be used to record outputs ordered by accounts and to manage them.

The easiest way to create operations is to access the corresponding entry dialog using the New Offer, New Job, or New Invoice buttons. Yabs then opens a new entry page in a separate tab where you can enter the corresponding data. Free text input is supported here; however, you can also just use the relevant data from the article master by entering an article number and then clicking on the Search button. Additional information, such as free text or images, can be integrated in the input screen using the Additional info tab on the input screen. Once you have fully filled out the form, save it by clicking the disk icon (Figure 4).

Figure 4: You can easily adopt articles from the article master when creating the operations.

Printing Securely

In order for you to print the individual stored procedures, they need to be connected to appropriate forms. Additionally, you need to define the desired printer in the separate settings dialog.

The program developer provides several Yabs templates for different types of documents that you can download from the project site. These templates are available in ODT and PDF format, and all of them are in German. However, you can customize the templates using Libre/OpenOffice. After downloading the templates, extract the zip archive with the templates and then load the desired template into Writer (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Manage templates in LibreOffice or OpenOffice.

Once you have customized your template, you can link it to the appropriate form. To do so, select the Manage templates entry in the Tools | Settings menu and click the Import file button in the middle at the bottom to integrate the corresponding template. After selecting the desired template in the file manager that opens, you can define which form the template should be linked to in the Type section of the settings windows.

The printer to be used must be defined in the Printer name field. If you click the Search button to the right of the name field for the printer, a list with all the printers connected to the computer or that can be accessed in the network appears. You just need to select the desired printer using the mouse and then close the dialog by pressing OK. Then, save the modified template by clicking Save at the bottom right.

If you want to check the respective form before printing, you can view the document by clicking the Preview tab at the top right. However, for this purpose, the first line in the respective list view must be marked. You can also export the new document as either an ODT file or a PDF file by clicking the corresponding buttons at the top right of the main window. Yabs then opens an export dialog box, where you specify the storage path. The document is then saved in the specified location; the respective form is, of course, also stored in the internal database of Yabs.

Once all the preparatory work has been completed and the document meets your expectations, you can trigger the printing process by clicking the printer icon either at the top right in the program window's button bar or in the preview window. The software then opens a printer dialog, where you can, for example, select certain pages to be printed in multipage documents.

Alarm!

Unfortunately, not all customers are well known for paying their bills on time. This is why inventory management and accounting programs should also always include open item management for automatically monitoring incoming payments. To this end, Yabs has integrated deadline monitoring, which automatically opens when the program starts. Here, in the Home screen tab, you can view open items, open orders, and open offers, and you can generate recurring bills for a certain period at the bottom.

Yabs has integrated a small calendar management tool where you can enter both one-off and recurring events. You can add new entries in a separate dialog by clicking the New event button at the bottom right under the event list. The calendar and the recorded events are listed on the right in the application's main window. Thus, you always have an overview of upcoming activities as well as those from the past.

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