Independent Liquor Group PDF Invoice Project

Independent Liquor Group (ILG) is a major liquor wholesaler in Sydney. We sell about 2.5m cases of wine and spirits each year to pubs and restaurants. We have sophisticated electronic commerce interfaces and about 80% of our business comes to us on-line. We use OVMS internally and Win2000S systems for the Internet.

Although we provide paper invoices with deliveries, and also provide electronic invoices to our customers, we are still plagued by requests for copies of back invoices and credit notes from both customers and suppliers, sometimes going back six months. We used to provide these by fax or e-mail.

With the aid of TXT2PDF, we now provide up to six months back invoices in PDF format on our Web sites. Customers can search for and download the PDF version themselves on a 24x7 basis. This is better for both of our customers and us, especially since our customers do business at all hours of the day and night.

We already had the Web facilities and the text versions of the invoices. To automate the production of the PDF invoices on OVMS and integrate them with our Win2000S Web sites took only two man days... the hardest part was the company logo! This project was probably easier for us since the same people have developed both systems. We were able to make our PDF invoices look exactly the same as our paper invoices. See example below.

We generate our invoices with software we have developed ourselves in house as part of a much larger system. We use a multi-platform development environment call "Synergy". Synergy evolved from an old Digital (DEC) language called Dibol that was originally on DEC PDP computers, but the same code will run unmodified on a host of systems, including OVMS, Windows, Unix and Linux. In fact, the invoicing software we use is 25 years old but it still does what we want.

I suppose this simple project illustrates how smart, modern tools like TXT2PDF can be used to extend the useful life of the legacy systems that are used by many companies in all parts of the world! We now hope to eventually phase out of printed invoices completely.

Here 2 nice examples of invoices:
invoice 1
invoice 2