T&L Publications

I do warranty service for a company that provides printed forms for warranty reports.
I am looking for software that will allow form filling of these forms, with the ability to capture the information and possibly add additional fields plus generate reports.
Something off-the-shelf that can be customized would be ideal since I am not ready to invest the time or money in a custom package.
I tried using Quickbooks but it is not flexible enough to do what is needed, or I don't know how to do it

Anybody have any hands-on experience with this type software?

Suggestions...
Thanks,
Len

it may not be exactly what your looking for, but try looking at OpenBravo, it seems to do everything you are talking about I believe.

I did a quick look and it appears geared to POS and distribution, and that is not the application. Also it is way too expen$ive fro this need.
Thanks anyway!
Len

maybe your looking for more of something like this.

http://www.gnucash.org/

Also, I thought openbravo was free, I may be wrong tho, but oh well.

Lenp wrote:I do warranty service for a company that provides printed forms for warranty reports.
I am looking for software that will allow form filling of these forms, with the ability to capture the information and possibly add additional fields plus generate reports

Thanks again, but, I am not looking for accounting / book keeping / business software. This software would be for filling in the already printed forms that are used by the company. There are several 'forms filling' packages but they require a a lot of time to set up, ere quite costly and and are pretty inflexible.
Thanks,
Len

Len,

I write software for the death care industry. Because the industry is so regulated, there are often a dozen forms to fill out and sign in a given arrangement. We convert paper forms to Acrobat-fillable docs and then use data stored in a DB to fill and print them. Since there are so many similar fields across forms, this saves lots of repetition. You may have a similar situation.

To do this we use a couple of technologies. Check out iText (lowagie) and PDFBox (apache). You may be able to find a project out there where someone solved a similar problem and use it right out of the box. To (re)author your forms, I think the Adobe folks are still offering CS2 as a free download.

Hope this helps.

--Kurt

Hi. Kurt
Interesting approach.
I am away for a few more days but will look into it when I return.
Thanks
Len

I also recommend some sort of PDF based forms. I think you can do most of what you want in the full version of Acrobat or maybe some non Adobe products as well.

I believe you can do most of what you want in MS Office products, Word and Excel specifically with field captured data output to CSV files or directly into spreadsheets, access database or CRM S/W like Goldmine or ACT for tracking your customer activity. CRM software for that matter usually have their own forms utilities built in anyway. The biggest problem with that is the users of the forms might also need to be running Office maybe the same version as you if you use many of the latest and greatest features.

Acrobat has a more universal appeal but office offers more power including macros and VBA programs, if you want a tightly integrated system to enter and track data, that's a good way to go unless you find an SQL based app I'm not aware of that's already tailored to your needs (there are loads of specialty software and they can be hard to find). I'm not sure if the forms you get would be acceptable to your company if you made your own version in another program that looked like theirs.