Invoice Ninja
invoiceninja.com
invoiceninja.com
Will you be publishing ads on invoices? What is your plan to have the service be sustainable into the future?
Without some obvious sign of how the service intends to fund itself a lot of people will walk away assuming that it is advertising and/or mining (which they won't like for their invoices), that it will go away as soon as some unknown reserve runs out, or that it will suddenly become expensive once they are dependent on it. They won't believe "we never intend to charge" (they've heard that before and it hasn't always been true) and won't email you to ask (they just head off on their merry way).
Also the live PDF view, which clever, is really also annoying as any typing or mouse hovering makes that area flash.
I'm not in the market for a new invoicing app, but if I were, the perceived sustainability of your business model is a dealbreaker for using you for it. My business deals with a 6 year audit window. (Technically speaking, multiple overlapping 6 year audit windows.) If your business fails, and I get audited, bad stuff happens. (e.g. The National Tax Agency might come to the conclusion "Mr. McKenzie, you claimed you had $5,000 withheld by clients in 2010 on your tax return for that fiscal year, but you seem to be unable to support that with original documentation. That's unfortunate, but we believe you're acting without malice, so in lieu of imprisoning you we'll just ask you to pay the $5,000 plus statutory interest of 8% a year."
Does this adequately explain why Free-as-in-Beer invoicing software doesn't exactly light a fire in my belly?
You could charge for extra services, for example API access or "Sell my invoice"-integration.
I respect your desire to want to office the service for free, but I don't think your comparison will help to assuage anyone's fears of you disappearing.
Given the number short-lived web apps that appear and disappear, the about us page is becoming one of the most important. Any "about us" that doesn't mention people is an immediate close for me.
It doesn't matter if you're a one-man band, put up a picture and work out what details of your life so far will cause people to trust you.
The question I ask my self when I visit a web app is "Why should I give you my information and what will you do with it?
Expect an "About the Invoice Ninja Team" page soon.
For now... here's a link to my blog http://hillelcoren.com/. I've been building apps for a while now and stand 100% behind anything I create. This project is team affair though.
I realize trust is earned and I hope we're given the chance to earn it.
Edit: added 'to' (grammar mistakes kill me)
For some more substance: I quite like your tool, but I wish the preview was more instant and not a pdf. Perhaps you could render your pdf previews to an image, and only provide the pdf when download is clicked?
Also, apologies if I missed it, but is there a way to customize the template, or will this eventually be possible?
1) In Canada you must include your GST# (looks like "55555 5555 RT001")
2) My business address, consultant contact name/email
3) Payment instructions (doesn't quite fit under terms, i.e. Checks payable to, or Wire Transfer / SWIFT code)
4) Ability to add additional billing information (i.e. one of the big companies requires department, a service agreement # and company contact under the "Bill To:")
5) Canadian dollar currency :)
I didn't find the pricing information anywhere on the site, however. Even after I clicked Sign Up there was no mention of how much it costs or if it's free, so I went back to the front page searching for that information and didn't find it there either.
EDIT: I noticed the box telling it's 100% free now that I had missed when I arrived at the site as I just quickly scanned it and then clicked the Invoice Now button. How are you planning to monetize it? Why should I believe it will always be free?
100% FREE, ALWAYS
Invoicing with no monthly fee, because you have enough bills already! Free, now and
forever! Quality invoicing to build your business and get paid.
@matthewmacleod That's a good suggestion, we'll work on it.
@lnanek2 Yes, but we're free :)
@ville, Our first concern is to perfect the application, making money will come later.
@peteacc. I’ll need to look into it, thanks for catching it.
@photoGrant If you set the payment terms for the client it will automatically set the due date for you.
But this is very US centric. But then again, one of my previous jobs existed only because the European subsidiary of my employer did not trust the 50 person strong US billing team to handle European invoicing in a legal way (so we built and operated our own billing system...) - billing/invoicing is tricky to internationalise right.
If you want to consider making it more generic:
Apart from allowing specifying replacement translated text for fields (for many countries this alone makes it impossible to legally use in its current form), a minimum would be changing decimal point/comma (many countries reverse use of comma and decimal point, for example) and grouping.
Also, this doesn't look like it can generate legal invoices for most European countries even disregarding currency, as most European countries have various text that is legally required for a document to be considered an invoice. For starters, the senders name, registered address and registration number (if a company) is required in most instances, and a VAT registration number (if VAT registered).
You can solve that most easily by adding fields for senders/issuers address details to put on the top of the invoice, and a free form text field as a footer, as this varies country by country.
If the invoice includes VAT on line items, there are also usually a legal requirement to sum up the VAT total for the invoice, which would be separate from any other taxes or duties, so you might also want to consider breaking out the different types of tax in your totals. (never mind that there are also rounding issues where specific ways to round are often legally required; in general you ought to be ok for most countries if you add together the unrounded line item tax values and then round, rather than summing up the rounded values - I haven't looked to see what you currently do).
German, Italian and French developers have offered to help translate the site and we're working on redoing how line item taxes are grouped. You can track these issues on GitHub:
https://github.com/hillelcoren/invoice-ninja/issues/31 https://github.com/hillelcoren/invoice-ninja/issues/29
There's definitely still work remaining but the more eyes we get looking at it the better we can make it. Please join our Facebook page and keep talking to us.
https://www.facebook.com/invoiceninja
Thanks again!!
In the demo you can't see that because you didn't enter your company details
That doesn't sound consistent with the "100% FREE, ALWAYS" banner.
By charging money from the get-go, you'll attract more serious clients, and you won't scare people away when you eventually spring costs on them.
Of course, we also use the web UI for consultancy time tracking and a couple types of invoice generation, so I'm fond of those features as well.
Minor niggle: the invoice redraws a lot when it doesn't have to, e.g. changing focus without actually modifying any fields. That's a bit flickery and distracting.
Enabling a ‘Pay Now’ button on an invoice requires configuring a payment provider. PayPal can be good when starting out but as you grow other providers may make more sense.
We will have affiliate links to these providers and will earn a small commission if people sign up.
The most expensive part of this sort of app is the development costs and I work for free. If we were hosting pictures or videos server costs could be an issue but invoice data is just text. I also have an amazing partner who is backing any financial concerns.
No serious person is ever going to use your 'free-cloud-powered' service. As for paid cloud powered invoicing cms, freshbooks is a good choice, because I know they are not going to disappear overnight. But they are damn expensive for a small company therefore I use self-hosted fusion invoice cms.
Could you trim that field before validating?
Otherwise really cool - I will probably use this even though I'm a little less than thrilled over the name honestly.
I look forward to invoicepirate.com (invoicing for piracy), invoicezombie.com (invoicing for reanimating dead projects), and invoicedinosaur.com (invoicing for ancient legacy projects that should be extinct).
Service is otherwise easy to use and looks nice.
With the 'due date' field have an automatic +30 days / +60 days / + 90 days option.
Chrome displays the PDF inline correctly.
as a bonus, it gives those interested in laravel a chance to see other packages to use for various functionality.
https://github.com/hillelcoren/invoice-ninja
definitely curious if this will there ever use a paid business model. i'm guessing a more robust feature set for a monthly fee?
Taking a cut of payments is another obvious one.
I'm not a web developer, but everything I hear about PHP is bad.