Canadian Tax Receipt Generator

Last Updated on Tuesday, 5 December 2006 04:34 Written by Steve Tuesday, 5 December 2006 04:34

Here’s an Appexchange package that generates a Tax Receipt Id for an Opportunity. In Canada, you have to give sequential tax receipt numbers to each donor. Salesforce does autonumber really well, but we need to only give these out to donations that come in the door, so we need more control.

The package consist of an S-Control and Custom Link you put on the Opportunity object. When you click the custom link from the Opportunity, you get the next tax receipt id, which is written to the tax receipt id field on the Opp.

The next available id is stored in a custom object. When you set this up, you need to create that object and give it your starting number for your tax receipts. It will then increment for you as you give out tax ids.

In Winter ’07 this should be easier because we can just do a query of the tax receipt ids in use, sort by tax receipt id, and limit the result set to 1. That would give us the highest number in use and we could increment that. Then we won’t need a custom object to store the number…

links for 2006-12-05

Last Updated on Tuesday, 5 December 2006 08:23 Written by Steve Tuesday, 5 December 2006 08:23

• O’Reilly Network — Using the Salesforce.com API
  This is part two in a three-part series on how to build and distribute applications on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.
  (tags: salesforce.com web2.0)

Project Management in Salesforce

Last Updated on Monday, 4 December 2006 05:45 Written by Steve Monday, 4 December 2006 05:45

I’ve got a little video of some work I did over the weekend on building project management functionality into Salesforce.com. This all started as a dotproject integration–connecting our project management system with our CRM. But it turns out that we really don’t need dotproject. The ways were managing projects is pretty straightforward–we’re not gant chart folks.

So the big hurdle was the interface for entering time entries. I know enough about Salesforce.com to understand that you can easily build a schema, but the interface that’s generated for you can be pretty clunky. If you’re trying to do batch entry of data, you’re out of luck.

I built a proof of concept for a timesheet data entry form using AJAX. I’m really happy with where it is after just about 10 hours of work (with lots of learning). Drop me a line if you’re interested in this kind of thing.