Invoice Example

What this app does

This is an example to demonstrate how to embed the Boss Insights javascript widget within a custom financial application. It provides a simple workflow to gather information from a customer and connect to accounting software, gathering data from the accounting software in order to show upcoming invoices for financing.

It does not perform any actions other than gathering invoice data from a connected customers accounting software.

⚠️ Disclaimer: This is an example application and not intended for production use as-is, it lacks code in areas such as logging and security and is provided as a bare-bones example of how to connect and fetch data from the Boss Insights API

Steps this application performs

1. Asks customer initial questions, this step is illustrative only and no data entered is used
2. Provisions private data storage for a customer using your API credentials
3. Asks the customer to select and connect a software application
4. Authorizes access to accounting software
5. Synchronizes invoice data and presents invoices to select on screen
6. Displays a success screen, this step is illustrative only and no funding or other action occurs. It is always shows as successful.

To install

The application can run on a standard Heroku dyno, or you may host it yourself. Whether you run the application yourself or use Heroku you will need to provide environment configuration variables which are:

Environment Configuration Variables

Variable	Required	Description	Example
ORG_NAME	yes	The name of your company that should be shown to users	Example Capital Corp
ORG_URL	yes	Your Boss Insights account url	https://example.myintranetapps.com
API_KEY	yes	API Key used to identify API requests for your account	APIPROJECT3
API_SECRET	yes	API Secret used to authenticate requests for your account
ADMIN_URL	yes	The URL to your admin app. This is region dependant and will vary depending on your data residency	https://admin.myintranetapps.com
ACCOUNT_KEY	yes	Your Boss Insights account unique identifier	5ff363e48e2a82.98390839
BRAND_ACCENT_COLOR	no	A HTML hexadecimal color code that will be used in the example app as a bold color for buttons and other accents	CA76F6
BRAND_LOGO	no	The URL to your company logo, will be displayed at the top of each page	https://example.com/images/logo.png

Heroku

Preferred method: From within your Boss Insights administration console you can select the Developers > Embed menu option, enter an API key and secret and click the Deploy to Heroku button. Using this option to deploy will prefill many of the required parameters to launch the application.

If you have manually checked out the code on GitHub and deploy to heroku manually you will need to enter Heroku config vars (which are configured in app.json) or the application will not run without error.

Viewing the application

After deploying the application can click the view button within Heroku to open your newly deployed app, it will be accessible at a dynamically generated domain like https://mysterious-ravine-99578.herokuapp.com/ or similar.

Self Hosting

For testing and development purposes you can run the application from your local development machine. You will need the following installed:

• PHP 8.2 or higher - https://www.php.net/downloads.php
• Composer 2.2 or higher - https://getcomposer.org/download/

It is assumed these will be added to your system PATH, if not you'll need to adjust the commands below to reference their full file system paths

Open a terminal and change your current working directory to the root of the freshly checked out copy of the code. You will need to run the following commands:

Install library dependencies

composer update

Start a local webserver

composer start

This command will start a local web server running on port 8080

⚠️ Note: Composer will read a start script in the composer.json file in the project root folder, inside this are environment configuration variables which you will need to change to suit your account information (see the table above for a list of the variables)

Viewing the application

Using your web browser open http://127.0.0.1:8080 and you should be presented with Step 1 of the example application.

How the example app works

When you first access the application you should be presented with Step 1 which looks like the screenshot below:

At this point only one API call has been performed which is to add the current domain name that the app is being accessed via to an allow-list permitting embedding of the javascript widget. This is provided as an example convenience and typically in a production app you would add this manually yourself via the Developers > Embed > Allowed URLs menu option within the administration application.

Clicking the Create Account and Continue button will use the API to provision a data storage account for a customer which will provide a unique customer account identifier that must be passed to the javascript widget on the subsequent step 2 so that it knows for which customer any connected data will be associated with.

Step 2 will present the javascript widget to allow the customer to select their preferred application to provide data (the Data Provider). See our documentation on the embedded javascript widget for more details on the widget itself. Once the customer selected an application they are redirected to an authentication & authorization screen where they grant access to share data, with this completed they are redirected to the next step in our example workflow. As part of the authorization process we store a token which will allow subsequent access to the Data Provider.

Step 3 will perform an API call using our newly granted access to the invoices endpoint of the Boss Insights API which will return a list of the customers invoices, these are then presented for demonstration purposes in a shopping cart style allowing the customer to select which invoices they would like to be funded, this funding selection and subsequent step 4 are illustrative and do not perform any API actions.

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The code and above steps should give you an introduction in to how to use the Boss Insights API, For support with this example app or the API in general please use our help center at bossinsights.com/support

Debugging

Two pages are made available to help troubleshoot problems:

• http://127.0.0.1:8080/debug.php - will show all current configuration environment variables
• http://127.0.0.1:8080/info.php - will show details of the PHP webserver environment

You may be asked to provide a copy of the output of these pages if logging a support ticket regarding this sample app.