Show HN: Invoice Dragon – An open source app to create PDF invoices
invoicedragon.com
invoicedragon.com
But this looks like a great, simple tool for people who need to occasionally send an invoice or two. Thanks for sharing it.
either capital goods, or purchases of trading goods or expenses. Now, all of these are technically purchases". Just that your accounting ledger defines the further classification. Now, all of these require "invoice", at least in india, that means you can't just say "i paid inr 500 for fuel" without a receipt/invoice. So what is a bill and how is it different than being expensed?
But an expense claim is saying "When I was doing what you asked me to do, I had to pay some money on your behalf, so please refund me".
Usually it’s just internal processes - Uber can be expensed, gas cannot.
An expense is an invoice someone sends to you for payment. This “invoice” might be as simple as a docket from a cash register.
If you receive an invoice from someone, it can be classified as an expense if it’s legitimately part of your business - depending on local law. If it is an expense then it’s deducted from your income so that you don’t get taxed on it - you should only be taxed on profit, not revenue.
If it’s not a legitimate business expense then you can’t deduct it from your income and the tax you pay is higher.
It is generally accepted practice in accounting that all outgoing payments should have an invoice from a vendor. Also all incoming payments should have an invoice/receipt raised by you.
Whether something is an expense depends on what you are paying for. If the vendor's invoice is for goods that you are reselling, that is not an expense. That goes to inventory. Similarly when you pay an invoice from your heavy equipment supplier, that is not an expense, that goes to your equipment & machinery. However, when your vendor invoice is for something like janitorial service, utility bills, lawyer fees etc, these are classified as expenses and hence its 'expensed'.
For instance in France, it has been mandatory to use such compliant software since 2018 for all companies.
Not really. Well, only if you are a really really small company (read below VAT threshold).
Once you're VAT registered the tax authorities will want the irrevocability.
However, having said that the complexity in doing small business accounting (at least here in Poland) is not in generating invoices, but in accounting for them correctly with regards to VAT. Is this just a domestic sale/purchase? Is it an EU goods or services purchase/sale? Is it the same but for outside EU? Is the client a company or an individual? Does he/she want to return a item. Did you send an invoice, but never got paid? (you're still on the hook for the VAT) All those things matter and affect how you're supposed to record your VAT. In many cases of cross border transactions you end up recording VAT in a special way so it cancels out, but you need to report the right amounts. The logic to not mess this up is what makes people pay for this software. There is nothing stopping you doing all of it in Excel if you want, but if you mess up... It might be expensive.
My brother-in-law, Wallace, in the back office, is a system compliant with all of those constraints.
I have personally seen myself and other business owners issue invoices that are unconnected to any system early on - just generating it using some ill-suited tool like Word.
But once your customer enter their invoice data in Invoice Dragon, it's a simple matter for you to set up a "payment due" reminder for them. And then add on outstanding balance per customer. And so on, and the next thing you know, it's an ERP!
It's like twitter. You can write an app that works just like twitter in a short amount of time. A week tops. But that's not the hard part. Moderation, getting the product profitable, etc, are the hard parts.
People often get a bit of tunnel vision and don't realize there's a whole bunch of behind the scenes stuff that's the real hard part. No reason to feel bad about it, it's a human thing, not just (the proverbial) you.
You can buy a Twitter for 44 billion dollars, thats easy - but moderation and user management, not tanking the profits into the red, not killing the brand with weird behavior - these are the hard parts.
Like most content on Twitter, the discussion around it is mostly a loud minority complaining.
I agree that even out of those groups, there are not a lot of people deleting accounts and moving to other places. But, my perception is that a lot of people are indeed spending much less time on Twitter. Twitter competitors are not only Mastodon or Threads. It is also YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Netflix and alikes, advocacy for consuming less social media overall, etc.
Then there is of course Mastodon and the upcoming Bluesky.
I do feel a bit like "what's the alternative"; I like being an active contributor rather than a passive consumer, so falling back to just reading scraps on the net makes me uneasy.
It can be hard to tell, the published numbers and other people's guesstimates do not tell much of the full tale.
I think many are soft-leaving: using twitter and which-ever alternative they are considering in unison while they see how things play out. Perhaps more than one alternative. People will eventually decide because multiple contact points will be a hassle, at which point we might see a glut of people leaving twitter if one of the alternatives has enough momentum at the time.
A significant problem ex-twitter has is that much of the advertising that left has not returned while user and bot activity hasn't dropped by nearly enough to compensate for that so the on-going losses have grown despite all the staff cuts and so forth. Some advertisers are splitting their spend elsewhere, some are playing wait-and-see like users, and some have just realised that dropping (or reducing) twitter as a channel hasn't harmed their RoI on marketing budget so maybe it wasn't a great channel for them in the first place.
[caveat: I've never actually used Twitter, other than being sent links to threads occasionally and thinking “this is a terrible way to get across an idea worthy of more than one sentence”, so might know nothing – long before the recent kerfuffle I considered it “too full of the sort of people who consider twitter to be a good idea” and from what I gather indirectly it is increasingly home to a lot of the sort of people/content that I already get irritated enough by on other channels!]
To be honest, as someone who doesn’t care about the twitter culture war and still sees a lot of value in the site, mastodon is steadily becoming a better place for actual technical content. Twitter blue checks have insufferable opinions, and I did better when their existence wasn’t forced on me.
i'll have to try it one day
Go for it.
I'm not sure about easy: it seemed to take a fair amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth to complete the sale.
In my experience
- you either did work for someone who does pay invoices, or doesn't
- if you are boned when the last invoice isn't paid, you are in very deep trouble. That means you're not in the "invoicing" business, you're in the flipping business
- so optimizing for the best case, well, you don't need to really track this stuff, or offer discounts for early payment or whatever
> of course integration with whatever accounting tools you're using.
Of course, you could be charging enough money that you don't really have to think about your costs.
The kind of person doing that has the bandwidth to install and use open source tools.
So ironically, the person who is arguably the best B2B customer, making tons of money, lots of bandwidth, pretty sophisticated, is the person most likely to use a simple open source invoice PDF generating tool. And that's why these things get adoption. That's why open source thrives.
I don't know if Invoice Dragon will make money but its users are necessarily going to be great. Because the person who gets the most out of it is running a great business.
> ironically, the person who is arguably the best B2B customer, making tons of money, lots of bandwidth, pretty sophisticated, is the person most likely to use a simple open source invoice PDF generating tool
That doesn't make any sense to me. If you have a thriving profitable business you usually just pay for invoicing software. Why would you invest time fiddling around with an OSS tool? just because you have the bandwidth doesn't mean you'll use it on that. Most people will prefer spending the time on something else that is core to their business or just their personal lives.
Open source thrives for many reasons. I hardly see what you described as one of them.
So to put a number which added up accurately I wound up with 5-7 digit fractional hourly rates.
It’s not an overly complex problem to solve in the general sense but it is very easy to underestimate the complexity, and this often leads to half baked systems.
I’ve got a ton of experience in this area, reach out via my profile if you would like to connect.
I tracked my hours for a billing period by starting a new invoice in GnuCash, and just adding a line item to it per day. Each line item was updated throughout the day, with very quick notes to myself of what I did.
At the end of each day, I'd print a draft invoice of the unbilled hours thus far, as backup.
When it came time to invoice, GnuCash supports/ed custom invoice scripts, so I'd copied&modified a stock invoice script to do what I want, including hiding the notes to myself, and complying with the occasional format change requests from client. I'd print to PDF or paper.
For a client that also wanted a separate summary of what I did, I'd copy&paste the hidden notes into an editor, and then rewrite that as a concise one-to-few sentences.
As soon as I emailed/mailed the invoice, the GnuCash accounts-receivable functionality would take over. The complexity in how it represented the data was a little scary, but it worked.
The real value is in being able to respond quickly to queries like "What were the invoices numbers for client X in Jan, Feb 2022?" when your accountant asks them. Managing that, timesheets etc. in a way that can give you insight into business financials is what's really useful once you cross a (low) volume of invoices.
That being said, the output of the tool is extremely good looking.
References:
But anyway it's a nice tool for people who want to do something with little fuss. Some nitpicks:
* if I refresh the page, all the data is lost
* custom select boxes are ok, but the list of currencies is huge. in a normal select box I could just type "EUR" and it would select that option. Here I need to scroll for a long time.
* an annoying thing in general is tracking the invoice number. It would be nice if it would remember the last one. Of course there are all sorts of complexities here, like people have different "systems" on how it's called and how to increment
* my company is always the same, so it would be nice if this data was saved. Sorry if it already does, I didn't see it.
But thanks for sharing in any case.
If this were like a notepad++ plugin or a site where I can have multiple tabs of these pages - I like this for resume, cover letters, etc - not sure if this is something new or just based on something existing - but within 30 seconds, I loved it...
So - bring moar.
My current plan is to add a couple more templates (CV, generic invoice, maybe some basic contracts), and just list these on the index page. Curious why would you need multiple tabs though?
To have multiple cover letters, documents, etc and be able to manage such in my ADHD MANY ALL THE TAVBS!!!!
So yeah...
I don't think we'll have a proper document management system, just a bunch of cool templates. Well, not in the MVP, anyway – maybe in some future version though!
I didn't want to use a full-on accounting tool where everything is kept in the cloud with expensive monthly subscriptions and using Word or something along those lines also didn't work for me.
In my opinion, the PDF generator made by OP makes way more beautiful invoices than GnuCash. However, generating is only part of the story; tracking invoice balances and knowing who still owes you is another. GnuCash does both in one place, which is why I am plugging it here. It's worked well for my small business. It even gives you a nice pop-up reminder when you open the program that reminds you about unpaid Accounts Receivable.
That's actually why I built GnuCash-Helper[0]. It's a web-based personal finance tool written with Python and Flask that works with GnuCash files. It's not nearly ready for prime time, but I use it daily, and I don't even open GnuCash anymore.
In general, I really wish that GnuCash would get a visual refresh and some more modern features. It's amazing, but it looks very 2006, and it has bad stories for mobile and web. Obviously, HN readers are a different breed, but good luck convincing most people to run desktop-only software in 2023.
I was asked by someone to help them find a desktop-only invoicing app because they didn't have reliable internet at their place of business. Sure, most people will want web apps, but there are always subpopulations with specific requirements that one can target.
I use LaTeX for my invoices, combined with the "rechnung.sty" module which allows creating the typical invoice layout.
The advantage is that I can use the scrlttr document class, which - if I call it correctly - can generate PDFs that perfectly fit in my country's (Switzerland) window envelopes when printed out.
And because I put all my base config in a reusable and importable file, every .tex file with an invoice is really short, essentially just the address and invoice positions.
We also wrote a web app (using quart and hypercorn) for this that generates PDFs (it's part of our internal financial dashboard that does a lot of other things as well). But ours runs the jobs on the backend, and uses luatex via latexmk. This internally uses scrlttr2 as well.
Screenshot: https://mero.ng/i/GKeVmAnd.png
* On a short invoice (let's say, 4 invoice lines) Font used for rendering invoice lines is way too big and space between invoice lines too large. I understand the font size and base line are adaptive to the number of lines but invoices with low number of lines are then not rendered very nicely
* Size for the description field is way too limited. Most of the description lines we used are larger than what is accepted in this field.
* Missing a "product reference id" column
* Probably not intended for B2B EU users as a few important pieces of information are missing like company number (the one of the invoicing company and the one of the company being invoiced, payment conditions, bank account, payment reference to be used with the bank transfer and, most importantly, no automatic computation and display of the VAT.
Best of luck with your project !
I got frustrated with the invoicing landscape being too complex and pricy and have been using a Google Sheet for the last ~10 years. It has an export to PDF button and then I email the PDF to the client. It’s easy enough for any grid-style design which is all you need with an invoice.
What advantages does Invoice Dragon have over a Google Sheet?
I use Python scripts to generate LaTeX invoices/offers/payslips from yaml files. It works very smoothly.
Of course it is more effort than using the built-in templates from the bookkeeping software, but it looks much nicer and I only do a few per month so it is not many minutes wasted.
The effort spent building up these scripts to their current level is perhaps impossible to motivate with any rational arguments... But I had fun doing it!
Note: I have OpenERP v7 still running for free ( well, except my VPS).
EDIT: * bigger
If you only want the invoicing module, I think it's free in the cloud.
edit: wow, of course there was a 16 bit version available:
> Agent is fully supported by the Agent Support Team and is available in 16 bit and 32 bit versions.
I'm happy I might not have to rely no making accounts on a bunch of invoice making apps to make bespoke invoices at some point
But don't despair, contributions are welcome.
99% of people in the US have never heard of VAT, so I'm not sure what you find surprising about a US-based project not including VAT...
For context, to charge VAT in the UK, you need to earn more than £85k/year
Some feedback from someone who recently built a very similar PoC invoice-generator[1].
1. I'd prefer to have it live-update an HTML view. When I stop typing, it shows what the invoice will look like (by approx.) instead of ending up with 15+ temp pdfs in my Downloads folder.
2. In the EU there's strict rules for invoices. E.g. on numbering, VAT inclusion and so on. Getting this right, is the hard part. A tool like this that works out-of-the-box for e.g. French Invoices or Dutch Invoice to EU company. Getting this right requires a lot of research and domain knowledge. Something that e.g. a French plumber or Dutch Webdesigner will not have.
3. The hard parts of invoicing is not generating the PDF. Nor filling in the blanks in a template[2]. The hard part is getting all the data for point 2 above and then tracking (paid, overdue, reminded, retracted) the invoices correctly. Most online bookkeeping already does all this. Integrated.
4. Including some VAT or Tax lines is a requirement in many (most?) jurisdictions. It now cannot handle it without some weird hacks (desc: "VAT 21%", amount: 1, price: "insert manually calculated number and don't forget to update it"). I understand and applaud not including these calculators. It's impossible to make this general; no software has done this properly; e.g. invoice-ninja requires the user to set this up, but still misses many use-cases/jurisdiction-requirements which then require hacks anyway. But there should really be a way to include specialised line-items. Discount, VAT, WhateverTax, Travelling-costs. That can be in- or excluded from subtotal, but do add up to the total.
I send maybe 10 invoices each year, so I'm probably your target audience. But I am only allowed (by law) to use such a tool if its either flexible enough to make it fit my local requirements, or opiniated and tailored for these local requirements. And for me, the real value would be in tracking these invoices (which most bookkeeping tools already do).
[1] my ultimate goal is to manage invoices in a web-base tool, have plain-text-accounting (beancount/ledger) as its "database" and PDF as export; something I'm now managing with a terrible hodge-podge of scripts, latex and whatnot. Where "manage" is to add medatadata&add line-items, then track them in overviews, and consolidate or book them accordingly.
[2] e.g. https://extensions.libreoffice.org/?q=invoice&action_doExten...
Most small businesses that I am around might send 24 invoices a year. There is an entire demographic that doesn't really have the need or desire for another service to manage.
Most people use this system through some SAAS platform.
Speaking of other invoicing software, does anyone know what generates those ASCII invoices you'll receive occasionally? The 80-column ones that look like a shell script that got piped to lpr? Just wondering if there was a common piece of software that was getting used for these or if everyone's IT dept hacked something together that produced approximately the same output.
Some things you can add to appeal to more people that are useful to most:
* Keep track of clients and personal info so the user doesn't have to type the address / invoice IDs every time
* Allow users to keep track of which items are paid/unpaid
* Allow users to declare sales tax on the invoices
* Allow users to upload their own HTML-based invoice designs
* Allow users to add subitems to items
Good luck with the project, it looks well-made and it will be useful for many people!
[1]: https://cakedesk.app
It seems fantastic, although I wasn't on the finance side of things. Any negatives to using something like that? It seemed awfully convenient for one offs/corrections for large customers when things done need to be slick and automated.
Shameless plug, but here in the UK we built Penny, which is an invoice factoring tool (U.K. only), i.e. You sell us your £1000 invoice that’s due in thirty days and we’ll buy it off you at a discount and pay it the next day.
We don’t have invoice templating but it’s a nice to have.
I’m still trying to crack the easiest way to reduce friction in entering enough but minimal data for us to be able to generate a usable invoice. Tough cookie to crack
- Privacy would definitely forbid many people to use this. Make it offline, app or offline deployable ... would help. - obviously translations into other languages
HTML Jinja templates seem to be fairly standard in this space.
Reminds me of Manta https://github.com/hql287/Manta, which unfortunately has been abandoned 5 years ago.
Even just a tooltip would help
Attaching the actual PDF might be another 'thing' that triggers some spam filters.