Project invoice
A few years ago Google silently disabled a spreadsheets feature that could be used to retrieve data from other spreadsheets. So I could no longer create invoices automatically and was back to having to make them by hand.
alternatives
Of course I first had a look at the alternatives out there, albeit a quick one. Most of them are subscription/cloud based services. Some are even free, until you want the useful stuff.
Pricing varies between a 100 an 150 euro’s per year. Which is not a lot but I tend to get too critical when I have to pay money for things I could easily build myself.
open source
A quick mockup with Angular 1 and localStorage was easy enough (this was late 2015, hence ng1). And if it works for me it might work for others so I thought I’d throw it online and open source it.
Which is easier said than done of course. First I ported it to Angular 2+ and made it more user-friendly.
I had been building and using it for a while when I discovered a severe memory leak. I wasn’t able to fix it because Angular is a bitch to debug. Long story short: two weeks to rewrite everything to Vue. The app is now smaller, runs faster and also compiles faster.
release
So that’s where it’s at now. The sources are on Github (together with enough todo’s in the issue tracker). Everything is published to a subdomain (I’m still looking for a good domain name, although project-invoice does abbreviate nicely).
I could easily go on for another year of finetuning and adding features, or I could just throw it out there. So all I need now are testers.
If you are self employed and looking for an easy way to do your invoicing please give this app a go. And leave any issues you find or ideas you have in the issue tracker.
why you want this?
- All private data remains private. After the initial load of the application itself there is no communication from- or to the server. Your data is stored on your machine or device in localStorage.
- Invoices are well designed and customizable.
- It’s easy to use
- It’s open-source. So if a bug needs fixing or you want a new feature anyone can fix and/or build it. You can even run it on a local server should you want to.
- Its free.
- You can use the online version or run a local copy
Here’s the link again: Project invoice