Tuotempo is a patient CRM for clinics and hospitals (appointment scheduling system, automatic reminders, patient portal and so on)

Many of our customers request integration with an accounting system and, since we use several Zoho products ourselves, we are looking to integrating Zoho Books for this purpose.

The main goal at the moment is to provide a way to easily create invoices in ZB for appointments marked as completed (=doctor visit has taken place) in tuotempo scheduling system.

 

To achieve this, the idea is to use ZB Api to create a billable expense in ZB for each appointment created in tuotempo. 

The billable expense would be linked to a given tuotempo patient (contact in ZB) 

Therefore a new contact in ZB should also be created if the billable expense is linked to a newly registered patient.

After billable expenses are created for each completed appointment and contacts for each patient, the clinic would simply use zoho books normally: create a new invoice , select a contact/patient, and then select, among the unbilled expenses linked to that contact, the appointments to be invoiced.

Questions:

1) What do you think in general of this plan? Any reason why you might think it would not work? Any better ideas? 

2) As far as I could see expenses is the only entity that can be used to record "a queue of appoinntments waiting to be invoiced" and the only alternative would be to create a draft invoice for each appointment. Are we missing any other alternative?

3) In creating the billable expenses, we would also like to link them to the doctor that provided the service through the expense account (have a distinct expense account for each doctor) but I was not able to find in ZB Api a way to create expense accounts. Is this not possible? 

4) What about Api limits? How many expenses and contact would we be able to create per day? Should there be a delay between each request? 

Thanks in advance for your assistance