Order To Cash application

This is an application for Order to Cash, a common business process. This is developed using Zoho creator. In short,

The Order-to-Cash process begins with the arrival ( and recording ) of an order for a specified product from an approved customer. The order can ONLY be accepted if a sufficient inventory exists of the product. After the order is accepted, it is fulfilled at some point of time when an invoice has to be generated. Generation of the invoice also creates a Accounts Receivable entry and sets the order status to delivered. Subsequently a payment is received, the invoice is marked paid, the AR entry is marked paid and entry is made in the cash ledger.

We developed the application using the following steps.

1. The candidates that can become the entities are identified.
2. The primary keys are established and the attributes of each entity are found.
3. The necessary relationships among the entities are identified and foreign keys are
generated.
4. After the entity-relationship model is developed, the entities are created as forms in the "zoho creator".
5. The process flow in the application is as follows:

• The administrator adds new products along with the price and the stock to the Product form. The product Id is autoincremented for each product.
• The customer first visits the 'Customer' page, where he registers himself, providing his details. After registering, a mail is sent to the customer with his customer id, which he needs to use for the further transactions. (Since Zoho creator does not support encryption of passwords, the password appears as plain text only.)
• Now, the customer visits the 'Product' page, to view the list of all the items available, prices and the stock.
• The customer, then proceeds to the 'Place Order' page, where he enters his id, password and chooses the product he needs to purchase and the no. of units. If the required no. of units is not available, a message is shown and the customer is suggested to try with a different number. On successful submission, a mail is sent to the admin and the customer, providing the details of the order.
• On receiving the mail, the admin goes to the 'Deliver Order' page, enters the order id and clicks on 'Deliver'. Here again, the order is delivered, only if sufficient inventory is available.
• On the delivery of the order, entries are made in 'Invoice' - where the status is shown as 'Generated'; 'Accounts Receivable' - where the status is shown as 'To be received'.
• A mail is also sent to the customer with the details of the invoice and requesting him to pay.
• After receiving the mail, the customer is redirected to the 'Make payment' page, where he enters his customer id, password and invoice number. Then the invoice status and the amount are shown to him and he is asked to click on 'Pay now' button.
• On clicking the button, the payment is assumed to be made. The invoice status is updated to 'paid'. The Accounts Receivable entry is updated to 'paid' and the details of the transaction are entered into the ledger.

Since, this is an Order to Cash application, it is assumed that only the already existing products are sold, no new products are purchased by the vendor and no updation of stock is done either.