Help with web app idea

[robcsaszar]

I helped the company of a friend of mine with the creation of a heavily customized Excel sheet where they can keep track of the invoices they've sent to their clients. It's a logistics company so they constantly have a couple hundred currently open invoices that have to be paid (mostly) as soon as they are due. As they rarely are, they hired my friend to track down those clients and get the money.

My Excel features a suite of VBA and non-VBA customizations to help them work together on the cases (case creation based on open invoice, commenting on a case-by-case basis, automatic sending of template e-mails based on current case status, and others). It's a useful dashboard and I am proud of the work I've done, but as their company grew, so did the volume of invoices and people that need to work on that file.

Back when I made it for a single person to work on their own laptop, it worked very well. Now, however, there are at least three people working on the thing at once, while the worksheet is somewhere on a shared drive located in a different country. I feel sorry for that poor Excel worksheet.
This was never supposed to be a permanent solution but they've come back to me to ask if there was a possibility of some kind of a local intranet web app. I'm 100% I could build it for them but I have 0 experience with web apps.

Are there any resources/tutorials or frameworks I can study for this type of work?

Thanks!

 

[adam]

That’s exciting! Projects like that can be lots of fun. Something different.

First I would check if Google Sheets and their API wouldn’t be a better solution. Since that is cloud based processing power and real-time collaboration is not a problem.

Beyond that, this does sound like it would be a good case for a front-end JS framework coupled with a PHP/SQL backend which will be good for all that relational data.

Laravel/AlpineJS/Tailwind is probably a great bootstrapped stack but this is no small feat.

 

[Gummibeer]

I wouldn't recommend Google Sheets because it's only the next limiting platform.
Next they want to send emails via button or any other feature that Google doesn't offer and you will have the same situation like now.

As it's plain/"stupid" CRUD I would recommend you to checkout Laravel Livewire by Caleb Porzion.

Livewire | Laravel

A full-stack framework for Laravel that takes the pain out of building dynamic UIs.

laravel-livewire.com

If that's too fancy for you - I would still recommend Laravel itself. It's very likely the easiest but still super powerful framework.

A bit older but definitely stable tech would be datatables.js - old doesn't mean bad in this case.

DataTables | Table plug-in for jQuery

datatables.net

You should definitely check out Laracasts! It's by far the best learning platform for Laravel and everything related.

Laracasts

The definitive resource for Laravel and PHP training.

laracasts.com

If you have any further questions regarding Laravel just ping me. 😉