Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.

Marc de Oliveira's Invoice Manager is a damn fine idea, and one which is almost perfectly implemented (I'll explain the 'almost' a bit later on). It's a system to aid a small business in generating and keeping track of invoices sent out, and has the potential to work very well. I was looking at v1.1, downloaded from Marc's Pythia web site.

The main interface is functional, if not pretty, with hot-spots to tap on to edit the different sections of the invoice. There are several linked database tables behind the scenes, with customers, invoice 'lines' and invoices themselves, so that once you've defined a customer or product you never have to do so again. As time goes on, the invoice creation process should become more and more 'point and tap'(!)

Marc's used a system of nested dialogs to set all this up, which is fair enough except that the way he's used the Enter and Esc keys throughout is very confusing, with the former often meaning Edit and the latter "OK, done." Once you get the hang of it, though, it's easy enough to move along quite quickly.

Actual generation of hard copy is where it all gets interesting. Invoice Manager generates HTML pages which can be viewed in Psion's freeware web browser and all appears fine until you realise (and Marc does point this out) that the browser can't print! Perhaps this is something Psion could fix in a future version, but in the meantime the only way to get hardcopy is to transfer the invoice HTML file to a desk-top machine and print from there instead. This may or may not be a problem, depending on your business's circumstances.

There is a brief set of well-implemented help screens and the application is well polished considering the author's first language isn't english. My only complaint would be that the invoice layout is fixed and there are no options to change it.

This application shows a lot of promise and Marc's released it as fully-working shareware, for which he is to be commended. With the Series 5's embedded object technology, invoices could also be generated using just the built-in applications, but Invoice Manager's intelligent internal database handling makes a lot of difference and could be a major time saver.

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