But this looks like a great, simple tool for people who need to occasionally send an invoice or two. Thanks for sharing it.
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.
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 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.
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'.
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 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!
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:
So to put a number which added up accurately I wound up with 5-7 digit fractional hourly rates.
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.