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Invoicing Is Killing Me

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One thing that plagues me, no matter how good my month is going, is the task of invoicing. There are so many things that need to be tracked when it comes to ones books. Think of all the little things that need to be tracked on pretty much a daily basis for your ship to run smoothly.

• Expenses (Hate this one)
• Contractor Hours
• Products Sold (say your selling a good or something)
• Project Costs

Those are some of the things you must keep track of all the time. In addition these are some of the things you'll want your system to do for you.

• Send clients invoices and reminders via email and pdf form.
• Ability for clients to pay you via a click of a button (Paypal or Google Checkout).
• Brand your invoices
• Reconcile your books
• Report (all kinds of this stuff)
• Save Time & Money

As always I set out to find a system that did all of that for me, but as usual I couldn't find it. There were systems out there that did some of the tasks, but not all of them. Of the systems I looked at that did do all of these, I couldn't seem to justify the expense it was going to cost me for the system.

Quickbooks is nice, but it seems to be overkill for what I need it for. Really I only track expenses, record contractor timesheets (which Quickbooks doesn't do well), and bill customers. Really that's it, as you can see I don't need much. If there were a $19.99 solution that would allow me to send invoices via Paypal, I would be in. Paypal does allow you to send invoices, however it's the tracking of those invoices that aren't well integrated with anything else.

So what do you think I did in order to solve my problem? If you guessed start an application which tracks all my financials you'd be right. However at this point there is no code, it's just some screenshots of what I want the interface to look like. In addition to that I don't have a name, which I'm really struggling with. It needs to be something simple and short, because that's the whole idea of this simple invoicing system. I'll keep the name on the back burner, but I won't keep the screenshots waiting. As soon as I have a chance to take a snap shot of the completed screens I'll put them up.

So it appears that 2010 is starting off right now 2009 ended. Tons of exciting work and possibly a new piece of software to share with the opensource community. Whether or not it actually makes it to opensource, or if it even ends up working the way I want it, but the fact that I've again got the creative juices flowing is a great motivation to make 2010 the best year ever.

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