Polo’s Expense System

Nick Velasquez and Matthew Brown

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Fitzroy Nembhard

Introduction

• My parents have a landscaping business that is successful in providing services but have a very poor and outdated system for managing billing customers and keeping track of work that has been completed
• There are many ways in which their business can be improved with a management system that will help them keep track of their work

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Description of Current Systems

Right now the business does all their billing by hand including changing each bill for every customer according to the month. These changes that are made to the bills are also done once a month which causes disorganization on bills that need to be made. This once a month process makes missing a bill quite complicated to find as well. There is also a problem keeping customer information as there is not just one place they keep that data

Goals

1. Creating the UI simple enough to be operated by the client but also functional enough to be effective

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• Implementing a bill creation system that will allow the user to to edit and create bills easily

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• Implementing a storage and retrieval system for bills and customer information

Key Features

• Add / Remove customers
• Bill creation and edit feature
• Print bill or email bill implementation
• Import billing history
• Track employee hours
• Rank customers (size of job, how long they have been getting work done, money, distance) to prioritize work
• Observe and adjust company inventory

Technical Challenges

• Add / Remove customers
• This will require a well throughout database
• Bill creation / Sending
• We have not worked with sending documents or creating pdfs, so this will require research / trial and error
• Tracking employee hours
• this will require lots of testing to make sure the information is accurate as it will be affecting people's pay
• Rank customers (size of job, how long they have been getting work done, money, distance) to prioritize work
• this will require some sort of custom algorithm to rank users based on all of the factors listed
• this will have to be implemented on a system that only sends 1 bill a month with all work that month done on it. We hope to try and make a system that will work on all formats
• Import billing history
• Creating a database simple enough to use that non tech people will have an easy and enjoyable time editing bills and inventory
• Observe and adjust company inventory
• Creating another database for only the inventory. Make sure the inventory interface is easy for the user to adjust item values and add or delete items.

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Milestone 1

• Compare and select technical tools for Creating and editing PDFs
• Provide small ("hello world") demo(s) to evaluate the tools for Creating and editing PDFs, a simple UI, and controlling a simple database
• Resolve technical challenges: Find a library to help with creating and editing PDFs as well as sending and printing them. Learn which system is best for creating large databases.
• Compare and select collaboration tools for software development, documents/presentations, communication, task calendar - We will use google slides and documents for collaboration documents, discord for communication, Trello for a task calendar, and GitHub for code collaboration.

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Milestone 2

• Matthew - Implement the database for adding and deleting customers. Test functionality and ease of use. Demo creating and deleting users into the database.
• Nick - Creating the first version of a UI that we can model the features after. Potentially non-functioning but to test features that we are going to implement. Testing will include making sure the UI is functional in navigation and running without errors. The demo will include showing where planned features will go as well as showing navigation features.

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Milestone 3

• Matthew - Implement storing past bills and retrieving those bills. Test storage mechanism and retrieval to ensure no data is lost and functionality is simple. The demo consists of storing a newly created bill and then retrieving the bill back for editing.
• Nick - Implement the bill-creating system and a bill editing system that will allow the user to make bill changes for each customer easily. Testing will include ensuring that entered fields in the UI transfer over into PDF form without fail and changing an extracted existing bill. The demo will include creating a bill in PDF form and editing a bill extracted from the database.

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