Make a system, which can print of invoices for customers who place an order via the telephone, which will show details of price, vat, delivery charge and other calculations.

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Problem

My friend owns a bookshop in his local town called “The Book Warehouse”. They buy books in bulk straight from the publishers for cheap prices and then sell them off separately for retail prices. That’s how they make their money.

The company is divided into two parts. One part deals with everyday High street customers and the other part is phone based. My friend takes care of the phone based part on his own. Customers from all over the country phone the shop and order their books. My friend writes down the name of the book that the caller wants and their phone number. The reason he takes their phone number is because he has to find out how much the books costs and then has to calculate the V.A.T, delivery charge and maybe a discount if a large quantity of books are ordered. This takes too long and so my friend just decides to call the caller back instead of the caller staying online.

When my friend has called the caller and they have decided to order the books, my friend then has to fill out an invoice with all the calculations twice. One of the invoice is for the customer and the other is for the company, so it can keep a record of what the customer has bought. This whole process can take up to 5 minutes.

At the moment the shop has a small amount of stock and already my friend is feeling the heat. On average he receives a phone call every 2 minutes and one process takes up 5 minutes. All the orders get piled up and he has to work over time to complete the orders. If you think about it, he loses enough customers as most of the time he can’t pick up the phone, as he is really busy doing calculations.

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So basically the problems are:

  • My friend has to do all calculations by hand, which takes up time.
  • My friend has to write out invoices by hand, which also takes up time.
  • My friend has to do overtime to get through the orders.
  • My friend has less social time.

So my friend asked me to help.

Solution

He basically wants me to make a system, which he can print of invoices for customers who place an order via the telephone, which will show details of price, vat, delivery charge and other calculations.

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