Recording Purchases of Credits

[JohnFF]

Dear CiviCommunity!

At FF towers we'd like to record when someone has purchased credits for use in our Teacher Dashboard.

At stage 1 we'd very probably prefer to make a record of the purchase, the amount of credits purchased, and then invoice them later all in our office with nothing in the interface.

Stage 2 will be the ability to purchase and view logs through the dashboard.

What system should we use for this? The bare minimum would be a number of credits as a custom field on the institution, but should we be using CiviContribute? Activities?

[Dave Greenberg]

How about using contribution records of a specific contribution type ("Teacher Dashboard Credits"). Create a custom data set which extends that type of contribution record with a field to store # of credits ?? Contribution can be initially recorded as Pending and an Invoice sent out. Then updated to Completed when payment received. You might ALSO want to store cumulative credits against the contact record (institution or person?) as a read-only custom field - incrementing and decrementing the total available through hooks (incrementing on completed purchase, decrementing as used).

It would be helpful to think through the life-cycle of the credits. How will they be 'drawn down' when used, etc.

[JohnFF]

Thanks Dave that sounds perfect.

Especially wrt the view only field being updated by hooks.

J