Show HN: Bx - Slick invoicing, expenses, time tracking & projects

13 points by osrec ↗ HN
Hi HN!

After a few months of developing a product on the side, I've decided to post it to HN. I'll be honest, I am a bit nervous about it as I know how discerning the audience here can be, but I guess constructive criticism can't be a bad thing!

My project is a progressive web app called Bx (pronounced "Books"). It's a tool to help you run your business and includes:

> Invoicing and payments (via stripe)

> Expenses

> Time tracking

> Project management

> Inventory management

> Slick, interactive dashboards

It's nothing new or radical, but many of the existing tools I tried in my own business felt clunky, slow and dated, so I decided to build something more efficient, using my own business as a guinea pig.

I wanted to build the app as a progressive web app (PWA) that provides a rich native-like experience on any device. I also wanted it to be somewhat functional, even when offline. I think I've achieved both to some extent, and now have a single, clean(ish!) code-base that works well in any modern browser, on pretty much any device.

Here's the link: https://usebx.com

Please try it out and let me know what you think!

Thanks very much :) V

6 comments

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Great work - that's a very impressive UI! To say it's a web app, it felt totally native on my Samsung phone! Do you mind sharing which libraries you used to achieve this?
Thanks for the kind words!

I worked pretty hard to get the native feel on mobiles. Unfortunately there aren't really many libraries out there that let you achieve this easily, so I ended up writing a lot of the animation/transition logic myself - it was great fun! If I do end up making a bit more money on this project, I intend to wrap the code into a nice library and open source it :)

Just tried using the free tier to send an invoice - was pretty good. Have to say, the experience was a fair bit cleaner than quickbooks. Just wondering, do you render your PDFs on your server or in the browser?
Thanks! QuickBooks was something I used as well before I got tired of the slow interface and terrible payments integration and lack of project management.

The PDFs are rendered in browser using the pdfmake library. I did need to modify bits of the lib to get it to do what I wanted, but on the whole it's pretty decent.

I love the execution. I'll consider switching.