Managing addons
On this page
The core of Hearing Center Business Suite holds what every centre needs: patients, the catalogue, invoices, the website, users, notifications and tickets. Everything else — the diary, hearing tests, fittings, stock, purchases, the till and shop, accounts, the dealer network, the labs, reports, marketing, chat — is an addon you switch on when you need it. Switching one off hides its screens but keeps its data, so switching it on again brings everything back.
The Addons screen
System → Addons has three tabs:
- All addons — every addon for this script, whether you have it yet or not. Addons you can buy but do not have are shown with their price and a Buy this addon button.
- My addons — the ones on this installation.
- Orders — what has been ordered with this licence key on the License Center, with Refresh and Open them on the licence server.
The search box (Find an addon by name, what it does, or its code…) filters as you type.
Each addon is a card: a banner with its name, a Free or Premium badge, its icon, version and author, a few lines saying what it does, its price (marked in your licence when your licence already includes it), its state (Enabled or not) and the buttons:
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Details | The addon's own page: the full description, what it adds, screenshots, its key prefix, and links to Open its page on the store, Documentation and a Live demo. |
| Enable | Runs the addon's set-up (it creates its tables and default settings) and switches it on. Greyed out with Not included in your licence when a premium addon is not yours yet. |
| Disable | Switches it off. Its screens and menus disappear; its data stays. |
| Settings | The addon's own settings, opened in a panel on this screen. An addon with several screens also has Settings as the last entry under its own sidebar heading. |
| Buy this addon / Buy it | Opens the addon in the store on the License Center. |
Refresh store prices fetches prices and descriptions from the License Center now (they are cached for a day), and Open the addon store opens the store itself.
Free and premium
Free addons work with every licence and most are switched on at installation: Warranty & Guarantee, Discount & Coupon, Data Export & Import, Language, Appointment Management, Reports & Analytics, Employee Management, and Notifications & Marketing.
Premium addons must be in your licence. When you buy one on the License Center, its key is sent down on the panel's next check, the addon is switched on, and a notification tells you it arrived. Collect purchases now on the License page (or Check now) does it at once. A key bought elsewhere is pasted under License → Addon keys. See The licence key.
The addons of this script
| Addon | Free / Premium | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Dealer Network | Premium | Dealers, sub-dealers and the customers they sell to; the dealer portal. |
| Warranty & Guarantee | Free | Warranty cards per serial, expiry tracking, replacement claims. |
| Accounts Management | Premium | Dealer ledgers and payments, cash book, income & expense, profit and loss. |
| Payment Gateway | Premium | Dealer payments by bKash, Nagad, Rocket, bank or card. |
| Discount & Coupon | Free | Discount codes for dealers and sub-dealers. |
| Data Export & Import | Free | Any table out to CSV or JSON, and back in with a column mapper. |
| Backup & Restore | Premium | Scheduled backups kept here or sent off-site, and a restore you can trust. |
| Online & Offline Sync | Premium | Keep working when the internet drops. |
| Hearing Aid Repair | Premium | The repair workshop, with tracking links for customers and dealers. |
| Earmould / Earshell | Premium | Earmould and earshell orders through the lab. |
| Language | Free | English and Bengali, a switch in every panel, your own wording. |
| Footer Branding | Premium | Your name in the footer, not ours. |
| Script & Addon Updates | Premium | One-click updates with a backup taken first. |
| Appointment Management | Free | The diary, online booking, confirmations and reminders. |
| Multi-Branch Management | Premium | Several centres from one installation. |
| Audiology & Clinical Records | Premium | Audiograms drawn from the numbers, PTA, printable report. |
| Inventory & Stock | Premium | Stock per branch, every movement, transfers, stock-taking. |
| Purchase & Supplier Management | Premium | Suppliers, purchases, goods received, what is owed. |
| Hearing Aid Management | Premium | Trials, fittings, programming records, service due. |
| Patient & Customer Management | Premium | Follow-ups, labels, merging duplicates, imports, patient sign-up. |
| Online Lab Reports | Premium | Reports patients read and download themselves. |
| Reports & Analytics | Free | Sales, stock, patients and appointments for any period. |
| Online Test Report Creator | Premium | Audiogram, impedance, SRT and endoscopy reports with your own print design. |
| Employee Management | Free | Staff records, attendance, monthly payroll. |
| Notifications & Marketing | Free | SMS, e-mail and WhatsApp campaigns and automatic reminders. |
| Blog & Articles | Premium | Articles, categories and comments on the website. |
| E-Commerce & POS | Premium | The till, counter sales and receipts, and the online shop. |
| Visitor Analytics | Premium | Who is on the website and where they came from. |
| Office Visits | Premium | A note of everybody who walks in. |
| AI Live Chat | Premium | A chat bubble that answers in the visitor's language. |
| Commission & Referral | Premium | What you owe the doctors who refer patients. |
| Product Verification | Premium | A public page that checks a serial number is genuine. |
Addons that were merged
A few older addons were folded into others: Sub-Dealer and Dealer Customer into Dealer Network, Repair (dealer side) into Hearing Aid Repair, Earmould (dealer side) into Earmould / Earshell, Accounts & Finance into Accounts Management, and Sales & POS into E-Commerce & POS. If your installation had one of them, it is shown as old name → new name: its data, its settings and its licence key carry over to the surviving addon, and nothing needs to be done.
Housekeeping
- Rescan the addons folder — registers an addon folder that was copied into
plugins/by FTP. - Repair addon tables — creates any table a switched-on addon is missing (useful after restoring an old database).
Installing an addon of your own
When your licence allows it, a Build or install your own addon section appears at the bottom: Install an addon from a .zip takes a ZIP holding plugin.php and plugin.json (at the root or inside one folder). It appears in the list switched off, so you decide when it starts running. Without the ZipArchive extension, upload the folder into plugins/ by FTP and press Rescan the addons folder. The section also explains how an addon is written.
When an addon causes trouble
An addon that fails while loading is skipped, so the rest of the panel keeps working. If one ever stops the panel from opening at all, rename its folder by FTP (plugins/visitors → plugins/visitors.off); the panel forgets it until you rename it back. See Troubleshooting.