Add support for webhooks

[etho]

I’m just exploring Manager and it looks great! I just have a few feature suggestions I thought I’d post.

1. Webhooks to notify when quotes/orders/invoices are created or changed. The API allows us to create quotes and get information on existing quotes, but it would be really helpful to allow webhooks to ping a URL when a quote/order/invoice is changed rather than having to check all of the quotes periodically, which is server intensive and would cause delays between updates and another server receiving the information.

2. Many of our customers (i.e. individual companies) have multiple contact people each with their own email, phone number and also have multiple billing and shipping addresses. I expect I may need to work around this by integrating Manager with our existing contact manager through the API and use that contact manager to enter quotes and orders directly. Eventually a native solution would be nice as this would probably appeal to many business-to-business users.

3. Our business uses a few of our own custom-built tools to accomplish certain tasks specific to our business which must interface with our accounting system. Currently we use these tools and then enter the information into the accounting system manually, which is time consuming and error-prone. With Manager, I will integrate these tools with the API to allow the information to be entered automatically. It would be great to allow the addition of modules on the left hand menu so it is completely integrated into one system. I realize this is probably quite complicated and not feasible, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

Number 1 is a big one for us that would be extremely helpful (or if anyone has any suggestions to achieve the desired result, I’d really appreciate it).

[lubos]

1. There is new API going to be added within a few weeks. It won’t support webhooks but they could be easily added on top of that.
2. How do you imagine multiple contacts to work? Have a different contact for quote sending, different contact for invoice sending?
3. I imagine in future, it will be possible to create a custom tab but it would just contain a list of custom objects. E.g. you want to track phone calls, so you could create a custom object “Phone Call” with custom attributes and it would show as custom tab.

[etho]

@lubos

There is new API going to be added within a few weeks. It won’t support webhooks but they could be easily added on top of that.

That would be great. With the new API, I assume there will be some way of doing queries for specific data, which should decrease the need for webhooks because we can run:

SELECT * FROM SalesQuotes WHERE last_modified > '$last_checked_timestamp';

or (whichever method is implemented)

/api/{COMPANY_FILE}/{SALES_ORDER_CODE}?newer_than=$last_checked_timestamp

and just run a script every few hours and grab new data.

@lubos

How do you imagine multiple contacts to work? Have a different contact for quote sending, different contact for invoice sending?

Best way to explain is to add screenshots of what we did with our customer management tool (we’re still programming it so it’s a bit bare still):

Each customer is a company name and can have an unlimited number of contacts and addresses added to it, like so:

A complete customer history is available so each company is quoted the same amount for the same product regardless of sales representative quoting them.

Addresses are labelled Billing, Shipping, or Bill & Ship to keep track of them (we are planning on implementing a custom label, i.e. Shipping for Branch 1, as well), although any address can be used as either a billing or shipping address.

Pressing Continue takes the user to the quote or order screen with all the customer information filled out except for the items they are quoting / ordering. Once a quote or order is submitted, it is automatically linked to that customer.

I realize this setup is definitely more for business-to-business users of Manager, and not all users would find this helpful, so I don’t know whether it would be best to implement this at this time. We are planning on having our customers in Manager just having a company name and use the API to enter quotes / orders through our existing system into Manager for accounting. One thing that is important to keep track of per-customer in Manager is the customer’s default tax code (i.e. no tax, GST, GST+PST, etc.) although if that is not implemented it will become a field in our system that our system will pass through to the API when creating quotes / orders.

@lubos

I imagine in future, it will be possible to create a custom tab but it would just contain a list of custom objects. E.g. you want to track phone calls, so you could create a custom object “Phone Call” with custom attributes and it would show as custom tab.

Exactly what our current system does. We track incoming phone calls and link them to customers automatically based upon phone number. Perhaps an easy way of doing this (although not an ideal one) would be to allow external frames (i.e. allow a user to input a URL and tab name and insert it as an iframe). A better way would be to allow customers to create and import custom-coded modules. They could even be hosted and shared on manager.io, allowing users to extend their functionality and download what they want while allowing you to work on the core functionality of the program. Definitely not an urgent request, just something for the future.

[Giorgos_Arnakis]

Webhooks is an Awesome feature request. Anything on the table?

[rdavidsc]

@lubos

It won’t support webhooks but they could be easily added on top of that.

This would be amazing… Any news?

[ShaneAU]

I’d love to see webhooks implemented.