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Ask HN: Free/Open-Source Invoicing Software?

31 points by hanniabu ↗ HN
At the moment I can not afford to spend money on a lot of the great options out for invoicing and was wondering if the community knew of any free or open source options out there.

Some of the features I am looking for:

Input your business info, Input client info, Input project details and cost, Generate invoice PDF, Generate receipt PDF,

Bonus:

Ability to mark/track who had paid and outstanding balances.

29 comments

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throwaway_ghj
maybe GnuCash. You'll have to check for features.

Or if it's not at great volume, you could just do it the old fashioned way. About $20 at your local stationary store should sort you out.

efm
How do your clients usually pay you?
hanniabu
I do freelancing on the side and would use Paypal with smaller clients, but now I'm getting larger clients and wanted to make it more professional. I started using a free app a while ago and then realized I can only have 6 free invoices which just ran out. It also doesn't have an option for reciepts, which I just got asked for for the first time.
jamesdelaneyie
definitely recommend waveapps.com in that case. Free plan and no limit on number of customers or invoices, does receipts and links to your bank account, pretty much everything you need as a sole trader it seems!
viraptor
Zoho has free accounts and one of the available apps is invoicing. They have all the features you ask for. You can even integrate the "here's an invoice, pay me" emails with payment processors. I've only used it for a few months, but can't complain - it had way more features than I ever needed.

https://www.zoho.com/invoice/

(it's a service, not opensource software though - I assume you really meant free or opensource)

dangson
+1 for Zoho. I've been using it for a few months and really like it. Their iOS app is also pretty good for viewing time sheets and logging time.
seekingcharlie
I was previously using Harvest, but recently switched to hiveage.com. It has a great UI and the free version seems to be all I need (unlimited clients, unlimited invoices).
jparishy
Seems strange to me that you cannot afford the "great options" if you're getting bigger clients! QuickBooks costs $10/mo, and the competitors like FreshBooks are in the same range (~$12/mo). I use QB and am quite happy with it; worth every penny to me :)
hanniabu
My bigger clients probably don't meet your expectations as bigger clients. Also, I do this on the side so the jobs are few and far between so the sporadic nature of it makes me reluctant to pay for a service at well.
cauliturtle
I use https://www.waveapps.com, thumb up & 5 stars their product & service even I have been using their free plan for 2+ years.
kohanz
Agreed. I have been using Wave for 1.5 years of freelancing. It's free, but not open-source.
caseysoftware
I tried the free options for a long time and finally gave up and went with Freshbooks. I wish I had done it sooner because the expense tracking and reporting makes it a good buy. Frankly, it's not worth the effort of doing all that myself.

Their free plan supports invoices for one customer, so you can try it out easily. I'm on the undocumented $10/month plan for 5 customers but was on the $20/month for 25 customer plan for ~2 years.

(I have a regular job right now but have a few projects here and there that come up.)

xn
It went closed source a few years ago, but Quasar Accounting is still free to use (for non-POS installations), and the last GPL version still works fine as well.
eccp
I used FreshBooks.com when I freelanced a few years ago and I think it contained all the features you want and it was pretty inexpensive (~10 USD per month) and invoices/receipts looked very professional and allows setting different currencies for each client (eg. if you work remotely for different international clients).
sparkie
LibreOffice

It's pretty trivial to set up a template, a data source, and have the mail merge feature generate your reports for you. If you F4 in Writer, pick a data source you can drag&drop fields or queries directly into the document where you want them. The rest is just a case of trivial document editing which you're more than likely already familiar with.

Your data source can be anything from a csv (spreadsheet), an .odb or an external data connection to a database (eg, postgres).

selamin
If you want a self hosted web app, try Anchor - http://theanchorapp.com. 100% free and has everything you're looking for plus Stripe payments....
kelt
what a clean looking web app! duet seems awesome with a one time fee.

great find! thanks!

Raed667
When I freelanced, a long time ago, I used Solo[0] as a self-hosted solution. It allows only for one account manager but it was perfect for me.

It is written in PHP and the licence gave me permission to edit it the way I needed, so I did.

The same company also makes a "full-featured" alternative called Duet[1] that costs 49$ to buy.

[0]: http://www.getsoloapp.com/

[1]: https://duetapp.com

erlend_sh
Uhm, surprised no one has mentioned https://invoiceplane.com/ yet, which is the first thing that comes up if you google "open source invoice".

For my purposes free doc templates (in my case Google Docs) serve my invoicing purposes perfectly well though. Plain docs are also nice in that they're more flexible than a web based app.

NicoJuicy
Odoo ( used to be OpenERP) seems like a complete invoicing stack with stocks, purchase orders, estimates, warehouse, ...

It's free to install using the community version and some technical knowledge.

ruffrey
WaveApps.com, I've been using for several years now without any issues. You can track expenses and send invoices, then people can pay you by credit card. That's mostly what it does - which is good (it gets out of the way).
debacle
I like Bamboo Invoice. It's super simple, very bare-bones, but it generates PDF invoices, has some basic reporting, and can generate invoices and receipts.

It's abandonware, IIRC, but it's good software.

HeyLaughingBoy
GnuCash generates invoices and does the other stuff, but I don't remember if it prints PDFs.

However, I think BlinkSale gives you 3 free invoices a month or something like that.