I would like to be able to handle a billing model as well as the standard add items to cart then checkout model. This is what I have so far for a description:
The purpose of the billing module is to handle a billing model of payment
instead of the usual checkout method. This allows site administrators (or
anyone with the 'create bills' permission) to create bills (aka invoices) and send
them to customers. Upon receiving the bill, a customer may login and pay the bill
(in whole or in part) as they would if checking out with a cart. At that time
their bill becomes an order and they will receive a receipt (the standard
'invoice').
Bills are very similar to orders, except that the admin does not have to
enter billing/payment info to create one, and customers can edit the shipping
and billing/payment info after it's been created (when they checkout).
Bills also have a due date. Actions (such as notifications) may be triggered on
the due date, or scheduled to occur at a time in advance of the due date. Once
the bill is paid (in part), it becomes an order.
Additional thoughts:
- Paying for a bill will need to appear and function the same as normal checkout,
except that it should not affect or involve the user's cart at all. - Allow multiple orders to be placed against a single bill for partial payments?
(useful if using different payment methods, or paying weekly for a monthly bill) - Optionally allow any remaining balance to carry forward, being displayed whenever
the admin starts to create a new bill for customer who hasn't fully paid their old
bill; if the admin clicks 'roll forward', then the old bill's balance is added as
an item to the new bill and zeroed on the old bill when the new bill is created?
Questions:
Does this already exist? I've searched the contrib modules on both ubercart.org
and drupal.org, but haven't found it. (If so, I don't want to duplicate effort.)