[#5708] CBsubs page break on invoices

An A4 page isn't for invoicing. That's for much much smaller items. I don't see how you're going to fit a CBSubs invoice on an A4 page without significantly downscaling elements like font size, which you can do entirely with some custom CSS. The default invoice is setup to fit nicely on standard letter paper and don't foresee that changing anytime soon, sorry. If Safari isn't separating the invoices to individual pages it means it's ignoring the page break and don't know to advice in that regard.

Well in the real world our customers need paper invoices in A4 format to sent payments for their business subscription, so yes we use a lot of css to fit CBsubs invoices on an A4 paper !

Safari IS separating the invoices and respects page break BUT there is a blank page printed each time as US letters and A4 letters ARE different.

Kyle, we are dealing with individuals for our subscriptions but also with companies, and they still require paper and invoices to send payments

And I guess it won't change that soon...

Invoices displayed in backend are displayed...from backend.
And invoices displayed in frontend are displayed...from frontend.

It's that way for security (session) reasons, as Joomla has 2 different applications in frontend and backend.

To my knowledge, backend in Joomla has no API to display backend applications using frontend renderers, as those are in separate application.

And, yes I agree it would be nice that they look same (specially if you are printing a copy for you in backend and need it to be identical).

The only way I see here is to switch to raw outputs, generate the whole page from within CBSubs which removes completely the Joomla template output, and which will lead to some incompatibilities with existing invoices. So in short, it doesn't look like something solved overnight.

That said, there seems to to be a couple of issues in the content itself (?) that I will look at as soon as time permits. Kyle opened an internal tracker item for that.

Regarding US versus A4 formats, they are quite similar although have a bit different sides.

CBSubs has no hard-coding of paper formats. The browsers do the layouts based on pure CSS, so if you have a CSS element not fitting inside the frame it will generate a second page. That can be debugged using browser inspectors and rendering for print media, and is probably due to either the joomla template or overrides. So I guess for that issue you will need to dig into CSS debugging...

Hi Beat

Thanks for your answer.

As you wrote, for accounting purposes and to send to our customers, invoices have to be strictly identical whether printed from the back end or from the front end, which is really not the case today

Regarding the page break css problem, it seems only related to the number of information displayed on the invoice. As the back end font size seems big for invoices, as soon as there is one or two lines of info displayed, we get a page break with a blank page either on Chrome or Safari.

I need to urgently solve this as we moved a panel of 600 companies on CBsubs subscriptions and we need to invoice them now.
For a large part of them we need to print manual invoices from the backend until they move to a more automatized solution with ingenico during this year.

We also have a big problem with credit notes when there is an error on an invoice, or when we need to refund a company.
Companies need credit notes with invoice numbers, looking as an invoice, and not only a mention refunded or partially refunded on an invoice.

Can you tell me how to achieve this ? we have the case today with three customers and I dont know how to do it with CB subs.
That I don't want to make manual with a xls or doc file as it would be crazy for our accounting.

I understand all the potential of CBsubs according to what you explained earlier, but we need professional features to address professional customers.

This is not very difficult to implement, you need to allow back end user the ability :
- to issue a credit note for a refund or partially refund
- to be able to print this credit note with a following number after the latest invoice
- to be able to batch print invoices/credit notes from the back end looking the same as the customer will see in the front end
- to be able to edit an invoice details (name, address, error in item purchased, need to add a company specific detail) from the backend easily without going to the DB !!
- to be able to send this invoice/credit note from the backend to the customer either by email (or by pm ?), either in pdf or simply send a link to it

We also need to be able to translate payment strings such as web_accept, pending, offline, transaction... used during and after the payment process.
We had a hard time yesterday explaining to all our friend clients what offline method, web accept and pending status meant !

I understand you guys have not much time, but we really need help on all these points URGENTLY. we moved from zoho invoicing and crm to CBsubs and crmery as we thought cbsubs would allow more automatisation in a few weeks, but for now this is just impossible to address all the modifications that we need to do from the backend.

Thanks for your time, it may of great help to others using cbsubs in a professional way in the future

Jean