Missing PHP, found SimpleInvoices

Since last three years I’ve not playing around with PHP like i used to be.

The lack from anything objective to hack around or develop as new, resulting from a specific need has driven me to not to touch it.

I’m thrilled with a new project I’ve found – Simple Invoices.

Since this year I’m part of the condominium administration I’ve searched for a simple program to keep track of our invoices. It’s not a  lot of invoices to do, but if i can do it without a simple Microsoft Word document, and could do it using a program to manage it and eventually keep in track the bills and payments it’s a good use.

After a small market research I’ve elected some points which need to have fulfilled:

– It must be free

– It must be simple

– It must be web or in somehow portable as with the arrival of a new administration the decision to use it or not must be taken, and the program can be used it or not by others.

– It would be “nice to have” export to PDF and send by email, and maybe invoice recurrence

Well found the Simple Invoices !

Simple Invoices it’s simple:

Creating an invoice in Simple Invoices is as simple as selecting a biller, customer, enter a description and amount and click ‘Save Invoice’.

It is easy and fast.

It’s web based

Simple Invoices is a web based application. This means once you set it up you can then access and use Simple Invoices from any PC using a web browser, nothing to install on clients PCs.

Just open a web browser and go nuts creating invoices.

Has PDF feature

With a click of the mouse you can easily email an invoice as PDF to your clients through Simple Invoics

Well and for all this i’d like of what i saw. It’s a community project, easy hackable because it’s written in PHP, and you can always see what’s he doing by looking in the DB or code – no closed solutions.

I believe it’s not as good as a commercial one, but it’s free and simple. I believe also that it won’t met all sort of financial requirements, for example like SAFT-PT (Standard Audit File for Tax Purposes – Portuguese version) as other ones, but’s it’s very good for the job. I think you can manage to have SAFT-PT easily like as this example in softwarelivre.sapo.pt.

Other web examples are Invoice€xpress (paid), BambooVoice (free), and as standalone applications Primavera Express (free and Portuguese), Evaristo (a free Portuguese Java program), Time-Factura (free with MS-Access Database, and paid version with SQL), Invoy (for Mac and a small paid value) or Projecto Colibri free and paid also in Java. Many more should exist but these are the ones i’ve explored.

2 Comments

  1. Thanks for the write up of Simple Invoices!

    great to see its helping you

    Cheers

    Justin Kelly
    — simpleinvoices.org

  2. Great project this one. Congratulations and many thanks Justin.

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