Show HN: Invoice-o-matic – a free online invoice tool | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Invoice-o-matic – a free online invoice tool

invoiceomatic.io

128 pointscornet88 comments

While this is good from a UX perspective, don't rely on tools like this to make sure that you include all information on an invoice that you're legally required to include.

For instance, in the UK (which appears to be where this company is based), all invoices for VAT registered companies must carry their VAT Registration Number. However with this tool, even if you select to include VAT in the settings (which you must do if you're VAT registered), there is no box or prompt to include your VAT reg no.

I.E., never rely on 3rd party services to make sure you are complying with the law. It's your backside on the line if you or they get it wrong.

Indeed. Here in the Netherlands I need to include a line stating "The VAT is transferred to you" if I'm invoice clients outside of the EU, because I do not charge them VAT. These kind of options can be tricky.

You can include your VAT number, or any other info you want, in the field for your company details.

My point was that you need to know what you legally need to put on there in advance. While this particular tool allows you to create a complete, legal invoice, it doesn't give you all the info you need to do so. You still need to do the leg work and make sure you know whats what.

Most contractors I know do exactly that. These 3rd party services are called accountants.

It's always good advice for any consultant or company to have their accountant (and lawyer, if applicable) review anything related to their field. It's why we have them.

However I would not criticize a tool for not covering all the p's and q's of every country's tax and legal code. If every startup/SAAS had to handle all these cases, we would have far fewer of the cool services we use today.

And I'm saying its a bad idea to rely solely on those 3rd party services to know whats what. Even Accountants. Certainly here in the UK, if your accountant messes up, you're still the one liable. You then have to chase after them for recompense, while they play the "you didn't give us enough information" or "read the T&Cs, we're not liable" game. I've seen it happen too many times.

By all means bring in the professionals to advise you and do the donkey work, but educate yourself on the rules and regs. "Trust but verify" their work.

What does this do for me that the MS Word template that comes installed with Office does not?

EDIT: I'm serious. I can think of several reasons why I would not want to use this, ranging from "I don't want to have to remember a specific URL for this one purpose" all the way up to "I don't want to be sending my invoice data over an unsecured connection to some random statup-of-the-month."

On the second stage there's a link to the generated PDF, you could download that and send, instead of having them do it for you.

If they've generated a PDF, then they had to have you post the info to their server to run the PDF generator.

I'm a little concerned about whether or not you know this and just forgot for this simple example, or don't know this about how web apps work. You should just assume that any web app you're using is collecting your data, even if you don't "save" or setup an account.

EDIT: I assume this because I have written ones that maximally collect data, so I just assume others have done the same.

On draw.io we produce PDFs of diagrams both client and server side. It's not at all hard to do it client-side. The point you really wanted to make was that a server would be required to echo the PDF back to the user.

Depending on how anal you are, and how complex your invoices are, one good reason to use a tool over a Word template is simply adding the numbers up properly.

I joined a small business that was doing them in Word. After reviewing the last 12 month of invoices (about 200), I found about 5% of them had simple math errors, i.e. the Total did not match the sum of the line items.

Sure, you can get it right by hand, but why bother when using software can eliminate the adding-up step entirely?

I would say over MS Word, this offers:

- Discoverability: when I was working on my invoice template, I looked all over the web, and found a bunch of garbage, before I eventually hand-crafted something in Excel

- Ease of use: Word templates can be annoying to fill out and format right, and they won't do the math for you. Excel will, but good luck getting it to print right every time, and heaven help you if you need more than one page.

- Fun: When was the last time you filled out a Word template and thought, wow, that was kind of cool!

For future reference, you can insert Excel tables (the type that do math) into your Word document. The magic of COM!

I wrote something similar to this a few years ago:

http://billable.me

There's nothing wrong with a bit of competition and it makes me wonder if this space needs something... Why do these keep appearing?

Ditto, but I never made it public.

I think things like this are nice because they are fun to design and build, but they also provide real value.

I think because it's a relatively easy idea to come up with, and the implementation details aren't earth-shattering. A year ago I was fixed on making a similar business called MeteorBill and worked part-time on it for a couple months before scrapping it .. I'm happy I did now, as my market research was clearly incomplete, and my UI was startlingly similar to yours and OP's. No great loss, I learned Erlang/OTP and Mnesia via that project.

I am interested in understanding why you decided not to continue with your business ? It looks like OP's company is doing pretty well. Customers would not be an issue for you. If you look at the number of employees OP has it is a possible market to persue. Competition exists everywhere.

I also wasn't so enamored anymore with the idea of spending lots of time on software to help people bill each other. Silly of course, as it's a real need, but I realized it just wasn't where my head was. Could I have made the business work? Maybe, but it would've felt like nothing but work.

There's a big political push in the UK for "electronic invoicing". This makes sense in that context.

I started my freelancing career with billable.me. Moved on to complexer tools by now, but I definitely made a few thousand euro with the help of your free tool.

Thanks!

What tools did you start using after billlableme?

I'm using InvoiceFox (https://www.invoicefox.com/) these days. It's really cool because it can remember all the different clients I have so I can just click "Invoice Company X for Y" and it also does some analytics of earnings and payments discipline.

That's really great to hear! :)

What technology did you use to build it? Or generate the PDF that fast?

It's built on node.js, there's a great command line tool called wkhtmltopdf:

https://github.com/antialize/wkhtmltopdf

I have an invoicing pipeline in the form of a Python command-line "wizard", which is effectively in interactive form, which then fills a restructured text document, which gets turned into HTML before becoming a PDF via wkhtml2pdf. However, wkhtml2pdf is kind of CPU hungry and not that fast. How did you make that scale?

Because it's so easy?

Because it's a good source of lead generation.

Much better design, but you're right with "[..] it makes me wonder if this space needs something..."

There is no benefit in this, except that it's in the browser, but that's all.

Love this lead gen strategy - offer free super simple tool to your target audience, and you get lots of opportunities to convert them to your full tool.

Adds a ton of value and shows you 'get' your customers before you engage them with your main pitch.

I also really like the personality (e.g. see https://twitter.com/invoiceomatic).

Am I missing something, or is nobody concerned that this tool takes in all of your business' contact info and banking info? In the US, the bank name, account number, and a smidge of personally identifying info for the account holder is sufficient to create an electronic check against the account, and there is no protection for the account holder for any funds that are removed.

- The info is being sent over http instead of https, so it can be easily sniffed along the way.

- Even if it was encrypted, it's probably stored in their system at least briefly. If their system is compromised, so is your banking data.

- The PDFs that are generated have to be stored on their system, at least briefly, in order to be sent out via email. They can be compromised too.

- Who knows if the emails and PDFs are secure... probably not. That means every email relay and the networks they're on between invoiceomatic and your client are also potential places where your banking info can be leaked.

I'm doing something similar, but storing the PDFs in Redis and serving them from Openresty/Nginx. If you use the password function in Redis it would be a little harder to compromise than leaving the PDFs on the filesystem.

For those not familiar with FreeAgent (the makers of this (marketing) app), they are one of the UK's most successful SaaS startups. I've been fortunate enough to have been a user of their main app (http://freeagent.com) for two of my businesses accounts since they started back in 2007.

The positive difference FreeAgent have made to running my businesses is on a par with that of Heroku. They saved me days (possibly weeks) of time and provided a user experience that's a genuine joy to use. FreeAgent have almost made doing my accounts fun. While they're not a replacement for having an accountant, they do have accountants on their team who have worked promptly with my accountant and I when we've had questions.

That's all? I expected something like duetapp or better.. :/

Here's the same, but opensource so that you can customize to your own needs.

http://css-tricks.com/html-invoice/

Note how that doesn't create a PDF.

Note that pretty much everyone has a PDF printer driver installed nowadays.

How does one go about creating (and sending) a PDF from a web form (like Invoice-o-matic and billable.me)?

I would take POST data, and plug it into a templating system (like Django's), which is using something like LaTeX to define the basic properties of the document and populating with data and logic from Django.

Basically a mix of two markups in one file. Meh, there's probably a better way to do that.

Eh, easy. http://jspdf.com/

You can create a file with javascript at the client side, without creating load on the server.

phantomjs could fix that for you.

http://phantomjs.org/

Referencing my comment below. Here's a phnatomjs example that will render a webpage to pdf:

https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/rast...

Btw. here's a link: http://www.duetapp.com/

Personally I wouldn't ever use a SaaS for my core business! With Duetapp or other opensource project for example, I am able to modify the source it. (opensource!=free)

Regarding duetapp, I think commerce and organization should be seperated. But no other invoicing app does that atm. anyway. However I feel that this is the last bit required to make it almost perfect. Basically I would create a clean and modular and payment gateway, so that I can be used by any other app too. Write a little duetapp plugin and voila. Much better than integrating every single payment method manually into system A, system B etc.

I dont get it. How is this so much better than having a, say, rtf document template on your own computer and emailing attachments from there? Or if you want to email a pdf there's printing to e.g cute pdf.

it's just one step instead of 2,3, etc

better mousetrap :)

Ok thanks, I'd just wondered if i was missing something.

It reduces chances of calculation mistakes as it calculates total amount for you whereas you would need to do it manually in a document template.

>calculates total amount for you //

Pretty basic to do that in a LibreOffice or Word doc isn't it (certainly is in LO).

yep I agree. The premise is that one has to totally unable to create a template with your favorite Office tool. Heck you could do that in Excel and that's already an insult.

This is completely useless without a system behind.

This looks like what a good web designer with little knowledge of actual accounting requirements would do. Not what I would expect from a company specialising in accounting software. It makes me seriously doubt that they can actually fill my accounting needs, so instead of creating a lead, I can't help having doubts about their capabilities.

The first thing I would expect from such a tool is either to explicitly point out the limitations of the free offer (eg 'only valid for retail in the Netherlands!'), or, if you expect users to believe you are capable of fulfilling their invoicing needs, you have to ask which business sector and which country you are creating invoices for, and actually update the template to suit the legal requirements of the user's domain (taxes, legal mentions, display of business registration, etc).

Main issue that I can see with this is compliance. As some people commented these free invoicing templates are great, but if you happen to invoice someone in Mexico or anywhere else in the world this template won't really help.

The reason why we are seeing so many startups in this space is because all major companies, such as Ariba that provide e-invoicing tools are charging suppliers for sending e-invoices, which is ridiculous.

Tradeshift (Disclaimer I do work for Tradeshift ), was one of the first startups that emerged in this space because they provide free and fully compliant e-invoicing software for small businesses. Take a look at how they launched, slightly outdated but funny http://www.realsupplierchoice.com/

For the past 2 years I've used Freshbooks. I work full time at a company and only have 3 side customers so I use the free option. It works unbelievably well. They're even adding more accounting functions to the great functions hey have today.

Very nicely done! I was about to ask how you intend to monetise this, if at all, when I saw the link to the main FreeAgent site, clicked, and thought - hey, that looks pretty useful actually...

It'd be even greater if you could edit all the content, including table headers and field titles, so that users could, for instance, translate their invoices into different languages.

Very cool, and more importantly, a fun take on a dry subject! It might be nice to add a preview option though. Sure I can email it to myself, but lower the barrier of use as much as possible to drive adoption.

Edit: Just got the email sent to myself. Again, very cool. Some ideas for enhancement might be allowing me to upload a small logo for the PDF, letting me save my company info, and maybe putting the 'message' at the top of the email instead of the bottom. But otherwise, bravo!

Great marketing by FreeAgent. Could you invade the Australia market at some point? I like Xero, but they're a bit slow on introducing kinda-important features like quoting.

The nice thing about Xero is that if a feature is missing there is nothing stoping you from developing (and selling) it yourself.

True.

I know of at least two companies who have quote integration, but basically I only quote every few months. I don't feel like paying another monthly fee for that.

FreeAgent does work in Australia - you can sign up for a Universal account, AUS $ is supported.

I don't mean multicurrency support; I get that from Xero.

I mean GST, BAS, the whole shebang. Generally the tricky part of moving into a national market isn't the currencies, it's the tax laws.

Shameless plug: I also wrote a free site for invoicing and it has the ability to include vat reg no. One of the pages that isn't published yet is the invoice designer, which looks very similar to invoice-o-matic. Nice job by the way! The main difference on mine is the ability to save invoices, aging and reporting. http://www.timetrackturbo.com

Here another one, open-source http://www.jonathantneal.com/examples/invoice/

source code: http://www.jonathantneal.com/examples/invoice/invoice.zip

I was just about to comment and say "This is all well and good but I use an integrated tool called FreeAgent to manage my freelance business." and then noticed this is created by FreeAgent.

I have to say, for UK folks, that run a small business or are IT Contractors, FreeAgent is a very useful tool.

I'd love to be able to specify the subtotal after VAT is applied as well, since that's often what you quote in practice and converting that to pre-VAT prices is a PITA.

VAT is also actually called BTW here, so the ability to change how VAT is called would be useful as well.

BTW is such a great name for a value added tax: "Oh, by the way, here's x more!"

Well, there's the up-sell :). FreeAgent does these things of details in the pay-for tool, including setting the invoice language, which translates the VAT field, for example.

Do you quote companies, or people? When I quote companies, I never include VAT (I guess you are also Dutch). Including VAT makes you sound more expensive, and the client can deduct the VAT anyway. So quote without VAT for companies.

I was actually speaking on behalf of one of their target markets, as me repeatedly having to ask my personal trainer to correct his VAT calculations came to mind ;)

I'm not sure if they just added the feature, but you can change "VAT" to something else in the settings

This is cool. I'm actively looking for a invoicing tool for my SaaS app that my users can use to bill their clients. The key requirement is that that the invoicing tool easily integrates with Quickbooks. Any suggestions?

Great work! Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to use it since I would need there are two taxes to calculate in my jurisdiction. Also, I rename VAT to something else, it stays VAT on the PDF?

Can you try again please, should be fixed?

Project link? Cool idea - Hate wasting time on small things like this; but not comfortable putting my, or a clients, information in a public site. Would love to host this myself.

"Warning All machines of the future need a modern browser and javascript to be turned on."

Smartarse comments like that instantly sour me when visiting a new site.

Agreed. I was interested, but after that message I don't really want to deal with them. If this is how they deal with prospective customers, I don't really trust them.

Is it always raining where you live or something?

I scanned over the list once or twice, but I did not see in the currency list RMB (Renminbi, Kuai), China's main currency.

Just wanted to give you a heads up.

Thanks for the heads up. We've got the spanners out and are tweaking her now.

Edit: We've had a look and there is already support for CNY. Are invoices normally specified in RMB ?

You got me. Saw the Invoice-o-matic. Saw the FreeAgent link. Evaluated the product. Loved it. Signed up.

I use a PHP GPL app called Imperium. Meets legal requirements and provides financial reports for my CPA.

hmm, this one? https://github.com/edoceo/imperium

Do you have a demo or screenshot?

I think one big hold up usually is payment for invoicing...and a payment solution that is fee-free.

The full FreeAgent app supports Paypal, GoCardless and Dwolla for direct invoice payment

Add the ability to upload a logo and that's the definitive winner in that field

This feature is planned, hopefully will be available soon.

just downloaded an invoice to check the quality of the pdf, its perfect !

A purchase order-o-matic would be a great addition too.

Very nice CSS animation :)

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