Summary
You have an awesome app, and your users are willing to pay you to use it?
There is still a barrier between you and the money: accounting, tax, payment
processing, maybe special discounts, reseller deals and more... Martin will
show how to overcome the boring financial stuff quickly using open source
tools, while leaving you with the flexibility you need to scale the business
in future.
Details
Commercial web apps are rapidly gaining popularity: there are many examples
of small web development companies finding success in the model of charging
a small-to-medium monthly subscription or pay-as-you-go fees, often
targeting small business customers. These businesses rely on getting a large
number of customers who each pay a small amount; it is therefore essential
that the processing of the financial transactions is completely automated.
I am a developer and have experienced several web projects which needed to
process financial transactions, during which I encountered plenty of
challenges: automatically producing invoices, handling payments and tax, VAT
rate suddenly changing, accountants' confusing terminology, bizarre
legislation, complex billing relationships with suppliers, resellers and
partners, internationalisation and multi-currency support.
Therefore I decided to develop some open-source tools which would deal with
all the boring core financial bookkeeping within a Rails application, which
would be resuable across a wide range of applications, and which would work
in a way which was both developer-friendly and accountant-friendly. The
result is the Ruby Invoicing Gem and
associated tools. It is a framework which allows you to write just as much
business logic as you need, and deals with everything else.
This walk will outline how
the Ruby Invoicing Gem solves the problems which arise, and demonstrate how
it works with a hands-on technical example (a Rails application operated by
a small UK-based company). There will also be a perspective on
interoperability between accounting applications using open web APIs.
This topic will be presented by Martin Kleppmann (click for more details on Martin and all our speakers).