Thought i would ask here… in case anyone knows of anything that is suitable…
I run a coaching business and our current workflow is a customer talks to me, and decides if they want coaching or not. If they do, i manually set up a recurring invoice, wait to be paid, and then start work. Works great.
However, we’re just building a new website with an ecommerce section. Customers will be able to to purchase coaching directly online without talking to me (and some other options we sell). We have a payment gateway and this should work fine.
On the other hand, when freeagent connects to our bank for the banking data there will, with the new workflow, be no invoice (recurring invoice or one off) for me to mark off the payment against. I’ll have to manually set up an invoice (or recurring invoice) and then mark them off. Being a service industry with limited numbers of people we can work with this is not too bad to deal with.
But, i can’t help feeling that it’s terribly inefficient, and there must be an automated way to generate an invoice directly when the purchase is made? If for e.g. i ran a shop and sold lots of products manually generating an invoice for each sale would be a awful.
So, i’m wondering, has anyone created some sort of API or automated system for this?
Presuming it matters, our website is hosted on Squarespace (or will be when it goes live), out payment gateway is with Stripe (and Paypal).
Any thing else please ask 
Thanks
Ric
You can totally do this. (I speak as someone who has just been messing with the invoicing parts of the API for my own project.) Here’s the invoicing documentation:
https://dev.freeagent.com/docs/invoices
I’m presuming for both payment gateways there’s some way you can trigger a callback to your website on success - you can have a script there that makes a new “Sent” invoice (basically meaning ‘active’) and then when your banking data syncs you’ll have an invoice to mark off against.
I found it pretty straightforward to use the API, once the OAuth gymnastics was done! But it’s not for someone who doesn’t know how to script, so you might need a developer, if that’s not you.
Short version, totally doable, I’d say about a days work for a decent dev. 
Cheers,
Greg
To be honest, that’s just gone entirely over my head :-(. do you know someone who could do this, and thank you for responding
No worries. I know almost nothing about Squarespace, I just had a look and realised it’s fairly limited in terms of scripting options (in fact, it looks like there are none!) however PayPal and Stripe both have this thing called Web Hooks:
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/webhooks/
So they can post out to a script when a payment is successful, which is what you’ll need. The problem is your script can’t be at Squarespace, so you’ll need some hosting somewhere else that allows you to run a simple script.
In terms of people, I don’t really know anyone who uses these technologies. However, when I need a good freelancer I tend to create a project on Upwork:
You could set yourself up on that and post your project, perhaps with a link to this page for background, and see who responds. You’ll get a range of people, good thing about Upwork is you can see their star rating from people who’ve hired them in the past!
Hope that helps!
Thanks,
Greg
in case it matters, squarespace, can take code ‘injections’ is that similar to scripts? thanks again
