Beta of "a startup" I'm working on: Billable. Easy invoicing. | Hacker News Reader

Beta of "a startup" I'm working on: Billable. Easy invoicing.

billable.co.za

55 pointspistoriusp46 comments

First thing I notice is that your site remind me of this demo that Chris Coyer published on his website: http://css-tricks.com/examples/EditableInvoice/

What would your app offer beside a single editable page?

Chris actually has some interesting elements there that you should consider - terms etc. are important to a lot of independent contractors.

Yup, absolutely his idea inspired me. It was the single creative element that made me realise that I can make invoicing a bit better than the other folks.

Besides a history and autocompletion... I can't think of anything else to improve this app.

Are you planning on adding PDF export? Or, at least, something like "email this invoice"? I don't interact with my clients in person, so just the ability to print an invoice is clearly not enough to make me use your app.

Yup.

How would this be different than any of the other online invoicing apps out there?

...Freshbooks, Invoice Machine, Less Accounting, Billing Orchard, CashBoard, BlinkSale, Bill My Clients, Harvest, Invoices Made Easy, Simply Bill, Simply Invoices... There are a lot of options in this space.

I have tried a couple of those and they had too many features for me -- overcomplicated.

Try CurdBee(http://curdbee.com), if you want simple, but not a toy invoicing solution ;)

I like that everything is on the first page. Is it going to stay that way?

I love this idea. With everything on the front page, immediately usable, it would be my first choice for invoicing. If you add required user accounts and a huge site around it, I've got no reason to switch (optional user accounts obviously wouldn't bother me and I think some people would want them).

Once I've got the PDF generation done I'll work on this next.

Yup, it won't change. I just need to figure out how to tell folks that they can edit in place.

You could put the blinking caret in price field.

http://billmebob.com/ has been around for a while and seems to work fine for me. You need to find and implement a reason for me to switch, but I like what you have so far!

Great Idea.

I actually needed something like this a while ago. started using intuit's Billing Manager.

Suggestions: Tax options, custom logo, and pdf generation. Also predictive text on previously used line items stored in cache might be handy.

I've still got a ton to implement; but I would love some feedback!

I would appreciate if I could also change the words INVOICE, Invoice #, Date, Item, Description etc. - you know, it would be useful for those of us living in non English-speaking countries :)

You can already do that now.

only the INVOICE at the top - or am I doing something wrong?

I think s/he means editable field names...

I've added it to my list.

A proper date picker for the date field would be good. Also, it took me a second to figure out you could edit the whole thing (if it hadn't been a Tell HN type thing, I would have bounced).

I like this idea, and the interface. Lots to do obviously but a cool start.

Having 1 item with a price tag of $10.50 will display a total of $10.5. I'd have expected $10.50 :)

Further, 21 items that cost $55.1 total $1157.1000000000001

Further, the validation for the price field lets you type in prices like "1.2.3.4", which is confusingly invalid.

Who needs tests when you have HN!

Maybe you expect payment in IP addresses.

fp math + money = Superman III

Do not, do not, do not use floating-point arithmetic for money.

Oh, thanks.

This is nice. I really like how easy it is to just bust out an invoice. I'm using google docs for my sidework and it's somewhat of a pain. However, it's offset by ease of access, storage and retrieval.

Some obvious suggestions: pdf/doc exporting and emailing, maybe an option to send to google docs for storage (and/or store them on your end through some kind of account service).

Just some comments on what would it take to be usable, for me at least:

- two boxes, one with my company info (address, act. info etc) and same for the company that gets the invoice - I see INVOICE text is editable - great, because I don't send out invoices unless they are paid, instead companies get "proposal" or "offer", and same stuff but with "invoice" when paid. This is due to tax - Tax box that calculates on total amount

- Amount due -> Total amount

- Shipping and handling - it can be as an item though

- Item and description can be one box

- custom logo image - this is mostly due to formatting. Large BILLABLE and box right to it can be both for "my company" info and other company info. Box that is below BILLABLE could be committed or re-purposed for notes. INVOICE header can be a bit higher with information for: INVOICE (or OFFER/PROPOSAL, brief company info and logo)

- save as pdf

here is an older real invoice I distributed out (note it's in croatian though, but you should get an idea): http://www.vga.hr/temp/old_temp.pdf My newer ones are more leaner.

add computation of U.S. sales tax/GB VAT/DE Umsatzsteuer/...

So how will you make money from this site?

I'm not sure yet. I was thinking of maintaining it at as free service to provide advertising for my pay for products and any other products that I launch in the future.

It would be nice if it could remember my changes (company name, address). Perhaps save them and provide or short URL or update URL in real time (/#field=value&field2=value2) so it's bookmarkable. Being able to add custom fields to the top would be good too (client number for instance).

I'm using local storage; when you leave the page it should remember all that information - As soon as I've got the user accounts down I'll make it happen.

The first time a visitor shows up on the site, maybe have a box hanging over the middle (light-box style - darken the content of the page), explaining you can just edit in place, no accounts, etc.

It feels...weird to be able to do all that without logging in, especially for this kind of data/form.

There was an OS X app that does something similar to this called Billable, but they recently renamed the app Profit Train. Not sure if that's something that should be on your radar or not as you move forward.

Looks clean. What is the reason you went with a .co.za domain?

I'm a South African.

Just to expand on this a bit - The South African webspace is a not very interesting and maybe a bit dead; we have a few gems and I would like to add my own voice to that.

Also... I'm looking for very rich South African clients :)

Awesome instant interaction - though for me to switch, I'd still want an account so I needn't fill out the generic info each time.

There is very nice piece of mac software which does what you're doing... and unfortunately has the same name :(

it seems like a nice sub-component of a larger CRM website. Would your startup offer any further functions for a small business?

Yeah, we want to do a ton of apps in a similar fashion. Supremely focused on getting things done in the simplest way.

what is the longer term vision for the product? what's the next feature that you're planning?

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