This document was written for Excel Invoice Manager. If you are using Invoice Manager for Excel (namely Uniform Invoice Software), please refer to How Invoice Manager for Excel (namely Uniform Invoice Software) works for the updated information.
Microsoft Excel provides comprehensive data formatting, calculation, reporting and analysis facilities. This is why so many people use it as an invoice creator. There are also a number of free or commercial templates you can download from the Internet. However, like it or not, this fact must be faced: Excel is basically a client oriented, general-purpose tool and is not specialized to store, organize, and manage large amounts of data.
To successfully store, organize, and manage large amounts of data, such as your daily invoices, the best choice is a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), such as Microsoft Access and SQL Server.
Excel Invoice Manager is based on these two time-tested technologies and allows them to do what they are best at: using an Excel template/workbook to create, calculate invoices and reports, using a back-end database to store and manage all persistent data like customers, products, and invoices.
The advantages of this approach are obvious. With the front-end Excel workbook, you get not only a What You See Is What You Get tool to create invoices and reports, but also the thousands of features that come with Excel to customize everything you need. With the back-end database system, you have a safe, efficient mechanism to store and manage large amounts of data.
From the point of implementation, an Excel Invoice Manager system consists of three parts:
The Excel COM add-in is a very flexible program that has the ability to connect multiple Excel workbooks to different databases. As a result, you can design your invoice management system as follows: