Lets say you are a SharePoint consultant and you are selling the only product – your time. Here I’ll try to show how you can create simple invoicing system.
1. Create Document library. Let’s call it “Invoices”. Add necessary fields (Quantity, Unit Price, Total, Invoice number, Date, Customer, Address .. Don’t forget to allow only unique values for Invoice number ant create Total as calculated field with value =[Quantity]*[Unit Price]
2. Go to Library Settings -> Advanced Settings and modify default template – create a design of your invoice. (I’d recommend to enable content types and modify template for one of them)
3. Open “Insert” tab in Word’s menu and insert data placeholders from Quick Parts -> Document Property drop down menu
If you go to Developer tab and enable “Design Mode” you should see something like this:
Save and close template
4. Go back to Invoice library and create new invoice document. Now you should see Document properties panel. If you enter value here you will be able to fill Invoice template.
Save new invoice and you can see your data in the SharePoint library:
Now we have invoice data in SharePoint list and in the Word document. You can use Word document to print invoice and SharePoint to have overview of all invoices with ability to perform some basic analysis. However, if you’ve noticed there are left some blank space (Total field). Let’s fix this in Part 2.
