Heterogeneous Payment Tracking System

Hi,

I know this is always a big issue for anyone who accepts many payments (and a VERY common use of enterprise software, for that matter) - but here in SL, as you know, we have a rather unique set of requirements for this sort of software.

I am a landlord with an expanding portfolio of islands, and would like to automatically:

1 (a). Keep track of when people pay me via at least these two methods: PayPal and directly to my avatar in Lindens.
1 (b). At a minimum, notify the tenant if they over-paid or under-paid their rent; optimally, refund the difference if they over-paid.

2. Allow my tenants to go to a web page and view their next payment due date, the current month's payment status (received, not yet paid, over due, underpaid, etc), and the amount of land they have. Needn't be account based, I am fine with people being able to see one another's payment status.

3. Notify me if someone misses their due date.

Data entry to the system would be performed by me (I don't care what sort of UI it has). I would have to enter the tenant's avatar name, their land size, and probably PayPal mapping fields, for example their PayPal email address (so that the software knows which avatar gets their rent due date extended when I get a PayPal payment).

A nice feature to have would be the ability for me to write my own fee structure logic so that, given a quantity of land and a payment method, the system will calculate the monthly rent amount automatically rather than having me fire up Calculator.

I am a software developer and Linux sysadmin, so I have some general ideas about how to do this -- but I am asking here to see if anyone has already "Been there, done that" and would be willing to distribute to me a piece of software that does some or all of these things. Note that I refuse to use a custom software system residing on someone else's server, or closed source programs, to accomplish these goals. By "closed source" I mean any software where I am not allowed to, at least, view the source code of every component you ship, and compile it myself (to eliminate the potential for phone homes of my SL account password and so forth).

The functionality I'd like relies on either *notification* of payment receipt (on the LindeX as well as PayPal) or continuous *polling* for new status items. Either method is sufficient, but notification is less bandwidth for everybody. Emails are a perfect way of notification, as I can code a program that notifies a Java servlet when a local mailbox gets mail.

If no one replies with software I can use for this purpose, I guess I will start looking into how to accomplish this myself. But it seems like a daunting task to integrate with the PayPal API as well as the LindeX. I don't even know how to go about integrating with the LindeX.

If anyone is interested in this kind of system, and no one replies with a solution, I will release any work I do under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html and post development status reports on my blog, http://tiyukquellmalz.org/blogs/blog6.php

Note: Even if someone doesn't have source code they are willing to share with me, I would still be indebted if you could at least give me guidelines, from a "which hoops do I have to jump through" perspective, to get:

-Notifications from LindeX when my account receives money, or alternatively, a way to periodically query for any new payments.
-Nice wrappers/helper libraries for interfacing with PayPal API. My preferred platform is, by far, J2EE (Java).
-Any special things I have to do to coerce PayPal or Linden Lab to expose this data to my server.

Basically, I would rather invest time (and benefit from the learning experience) to get software to handle tenant payment processing, rather than continuing to do this manually.

Please do not tell me to go buy a prim that has an LSL script that tracks rental payments by having people right-click on the prim and pay. That's not how I operate. People either pay my account directly in L$, or they pay me by PayPal - a rental box definitely can't track PayPal, and I don't want to clutter up peoples' land with tacky rental boxes. Even in the best case, I still wouldn't be able to instantly get the status of all of my tenants' rental payments from outside of SL if I bought rental boxes.

Thanks,

Tiyuk

For PayPal, you can go to their site and use their API. The user will have to log into your site and collect a link to PayPal, and once the money is sent PayPal will notify you.

For L$, you will have to log in a bot, which the L$ are paid to, and which notifies your software application when it recieves L$.

Linden Lab will not give you any special access to the L$ transactions list, not even Xstreet had that.

I wrote a script that copies my transaction history into a google spreadsheet. That way I have a permanent record of every transaction. It's not too difficult to just have a program log your account into the website, download the transaction history, parse every row and dump it in gdocs. Now you have a record in gdocs you can republish it as an rss feed or something and scan for payments by renters.