The demo is very fast, I just click a button and I'm in the middle of creating an invoice in a blink of an eye and it even produces the PDF right away. Good job.
I didn't find the pricing information anywhere on the site, however. Even after I clicked Sign Up there was no mention of how much it costs or if it's free, so I went back to the front page searching for that information and didn't find it there either.
EDIT: I noticed the box telling it's 100% free now that I had missed when I arrived at the site as I just quickly scanned it and then clicked the Invoice Now button. How are you planning to monetize it? Why should I believe it will always be free?
Um, did you miss the yellow block on the left side of the front page? It says...
100% FREE, ALWAYS
Invoicing with no monthly fee, because you have enough bills already! Free, now and
forever! Quality invoicing to build your business and get paid.
There are references to "Free" all over the front page.
I really like this, obviously a lot of attention to usability.
Minor niggle: the invoice redraws a lot when it doesn't have to, e.g. changing focus without actually modifying any fields. That's a bit flickery and distracting.
Great idea, small bug in switching currencies. When I change the theme of an invoice it defaults back to USD and does not revert back to the currency set in the preferences.
I'm actually curious at which difficulties you ran into when creating the app without authentication (have been thinking about this myself, just didn't create it yet)
Love the inline PDF preview, and overall it's quite clean.
But this is very US centric. But then again, one of my previous jobs existed only because the European subsidiary of my employer did not trust the 50 person strong US billing team to handle European invoicing in a legal way (so we built and operated our own billing system...) - billing/invoicing is tricky to internationalise right.
If you want to consider making it more generic:
Apart from allowing specifying replacement translated text for fields (for many countries this alone makes it impossible to legally use in its current form), a minimum would be changing decimal point/comma (many countries reverse use of comma and decimal point, for example) and grouping.
Also, this doesn't look like it can generate legal invoices for most European countries even disregarding currency, as most European countries have various text that is legally required for a document to be considered an invoice. For starters, the senders name, registered address and registration number (if a company) is required in most instances, and a VAT registration number (if VAT registered).
You can solve that most easily by adding fields for senders/issuers address details to put on the top of the invoice, and a free form text field as a footer, as this varies country by country.
If the invoice includes VAT on line items, there are also usually a legal requirement to sum up the VAT total for the invoice, which would be separate from any other taxes or duties, so you might also want to consider breaking out the different types of tax in your totals. (never mind that there are also rounding issues where specific ways to round are often legally required; in general you ought to be ok for most countries if you add together the unrounded line item tax values and then round, rather than summing up the rounded values - I haven't looked to see what you currently do).
German, Italian and French developers have offered to help translate the site and we're working on redoing how line item taxes are grouped. You can track these issues on GitHub:
There's definitely still work remaining but the more eyes we get looking at it the better we can make it. Please join our Facebook page and keep talking to us.
The columns don't really line up will in the invoice and website in iOS7 chrome. The description in the invoice bleeds in to the second row. Same with my account in the top navigation/menu bar.
Otherwise really cool - I will probably use this even though I'm a little less than thrilled over the name honestly.
Try Invoice Machine (http://invoicemachine.com/). I don't know if they support Greek characters or not, but they are a small Swedish team so they are definitely internationalized.
"About us" should really be.... about you, not some strange mix of "features" and "technology".
Given the number short-lived web apps that appear and disappear, the about us page is becoming one of the most important. Any "about us" that doesn't mention people is an immediate close for me.
It doesn't matter if you're a one-man band, put up a picture and work out what details of your life so far will cause people to trust you.
Expect an "About the Invoice Ninja Team" page soon.
For now... here's a link to my blog http://hillelcoren.com/. I've been building apps for a while now and stand 100% behind anything I create. This project is team affair though.
I realize trust is earned and I hope we're given the chance to earn it.
Does your 'content' assist with (what I presume to be) missing words too?
For some more substance: I quite like your tool, but I wish the preview was more instant and not a pdf. Perhaps you could render your pdf previews to an image, and only provide the pdf when download is clicked?
Also, apologies if I missed it, but is there a way to customize the template, or will this eventually be possible?
Cool, reminds me of invoiceomatic.io, which has a 'robot' theme.
I look forward to invoicepirate.com (invoicing for piracy), invoicezombie.com (invoicing for reanimating dead projects), and invoicedinosaur.com (invoicing for ancient legacy projects that should be extinct).
"100% FREE, ALWAYS" What's the catch? How are they going to make money? Harvest invoice data? Really the only reason I use Freshbooks is for the 50-cent Paypal invoices but I first create an actual PDF invoice in OpenOffice.
Thanks for your comment! We will not "harvest invoice data", rather in the near future we'll be offering more advanced payment gateway options for those who want to move off PayPal.
83 comments
[ 620 ms ] story [ 2546 ms ] threadas a bonus, it gives those interested in laravel a chance to see other packages to use for various functionality.
https://github.com/hillelcoren/invoice-ninja
definitely curious if this will there ever use a paid business model. i'm guessing a more robust feature set for a monthly fee?
Taking a cut of payments is another obvious one.
I didn't find the pricing information anywhere on the site, however. Even after I clicked Sign Up there was no mention of how much it costs or if it's free, so I went back to the front page searching for that information and didn't find it there either.
EDIT: I noticed the box telling it's 100% free now that I had missed when I arrived at the site as I just quickly scanned it and then clicked the Invoice Now button. How are you planning to monetize it? Why should I believe it will always be free?
[1] https://github.com/hillelcoren/invoice-ninja
With the 'due date' field have an automatic +30 days / +60 days / + 90 days option.
Minor niggle: the invoice redraws a lot when it doesn't have to, e.g. changing focus without actually modifying any fields. That's a bit flickery and distracting.
@matthewmacleod That's a good suggestion, we'll work on it.
@lnanek2 Yes, but we're free :)
@ville, Our first concern is to perfect the application, making money will come later.
@peteacc. I’ll need to look into it, thanks for catching it.
@photoGrant If you set the payment terms for the client it will automatically set the due date for you.
But this is very US centric. But then again, one of my previous jobs existed only because the European subsidiary of my employer did not trust the 50 person strong US billing team to handle European invoicing in a legal way (so we built and operated our own billing system...) - billing/invoicing is tricky to internationalise right.
If you want to consider making it more generic:
Apart from allowing specifying replacement translated text for fields (for many countries this alone makes it impossible to legally use in its current form), a minimum would be changing decimal point/comma (many countries reverse use of comma and decimal point, for example) and grouping.
Also, this doesn't look like it can generate legal invoices for most European countries even disregarding currency, as most European countries have various text that is legally required for a document to be considered an invoice. For starters, the senders name, registered address and registration number (if a company) is required in most instances, and a VAT registration number (if VAT registered).
You can solve that most easily by adding fields for senders/issuers address details to put on the top of the invoice, and a free form text field as a footer, as this varies country by country.
If the invoice includes VAT on line items, there are also usually a legal requirement to sum up the VAT total for the invoice, which would be separate from any other taxes or duties, so you might also want to consider breaking out the different types of tax in your totals. (never mind that there are also rounding issues where specific ways to round are often legally required; in general you ought to be ok for most countries if you add together the unrounded line item tax values and then round, rather than summing up the rounded values - I haven't looked to see what you currently do).
German, Italian and French developers have offered to help translate the site and we're working on redoing how line item taxes are grouped. You can track these issues on GitHub:
https://github.com/hillelcoren/invoice-ninja/issues/31 https://github.com/hillelcoren/invoice-ninja/issues/29
There's definitely still work remaining but the more eyes we get looking at it the better we can make it. Please join our Facebook page and keep talking to us.
https://www.facebook.com/invoiceninja
Thanks again!!
In the demo you can't see that because you didn't enter your company details
That doesn't sound consistent with the "100% FREE, ALWAYS" banner.
By charging money from the get-go, you'll attract more serious clients, and you won't scare people away when you eventually spring costs on them.
Otherwise really cool - I will probably use this even though I'm a little less than thrilled over the name honestly.
Chrome displays the PDF inline correctly.
Of course, we also use the web UI for consultancy time tracking and a couple types of invoice generation, so I'm fond of those features as well.
Given the number short-lived web apps that appear and disappear, the about us page is becoming one of the most important. Any "about us" that doesn't mention people is an immediate close for me.
It doesn't matter if you're a one-man band, put up a picture and work out what details of your life so far will cause people to trust you.
The question I ask my self when I visit a web app is "Why should I give you my information and what will you do with it?
Expect an "About the Invoice Ninja Team" page soon.
For now... here's a link to my blog http://hillelcoren.com/. I've been building apps for a while now and stand 100% behind anything I create. This project is team affair though.
I realize trust is earned and I hope we're given the chance to earn it.
Edit: added 'to' (grammar mistakes kill me)
For some more substance: I quite like your tool, but I wish the preview was more instant and not a pdf. Perhaps you could render your pdf previews to an image, and only provide the pdf when download is clicked?
Also, apologies if I missed it, but is there a way to customize the template, or will this eventually be possible?
Could you trim that field before validating?
I look forward to invoicepirate.com (invoicing for piracy), invoicezombie.com (invoicing for reanimating dead projects), and invoicedinosaur.com (invoicing for ancient legacy projects that should be extinct).
Service is otherwise easy to use and looks nice.