Invoicing Solution Freelancers

I've been getting sort of busy lately, getting more and more business, which is a good thing, although with more business comes a greater need to stay organized and to have an easy and fast way to manage and bill clients.

Previously I've just used a simple Word invoice template with my bank account number and information for local clients as they tend to pay me with direct bank deposit instead of Paypal or credit card like my foreign clients that usually have to pay me manually through PayPal, which is not the best option in the world.

But this quickly becomes disorganized when you've got a Dropbox folder filled with differently named "invoice001-clientname-20.07.2014.pdf"-type files, so it was clear that I needed some sort of software or web application to handle all the client management and billing bollocks.

So I stumbled upon this really nice invoicing software for freelancers when looking for a self-hosted client & invoicing program that I could use.

After trying the demo that was available on their website, I already loved this program, it's simple, clean and easy to use.

One of the things I like about it is that you can create quotes as well as invoices, and get approvals of the quotes.

Imagine if you had a client that wanted to know how much a medium e-commerce website complete with SEO work, a blog and video tutorials on how to use the system), you could add all of those items to a mock-up invoice and send it off to your client who would be able to see the price breakdown of each separate product ( e-commerce website, blog, SEO work, video tutorials) and approve he price you've quoted them.

If you create an invoice in the software you can download it as a PDF, which is great if you need to have a physical copy of your invoices for legal purposes or whatever, you can also send the invoice via Email, which will send the client an email with the PDF invoice attached(optional) and a unique link to their invoice online where they can choose to pay the invoice through either PayPal or Stripe.

There are some things I don't like and think could be improved about FusionInvoice, first of all there should be more payment gateways than PayPal and stripe, for me stripe doesn't work yet due to it not being available in Norway, which only leaves PayPal, who I've had some fights with in the past...

Some of the payment gateways I'd like to see:

• Skrill
• Klarna
• 2Checkout
• Authorize.net

When browsing your client list or invoice list on a mobile device its very squished, I hope that better support for mobile devices will be added in the future.

You can see that a lot of the data is cut off(Image to the right), and the tabs at the top are being buggy.

Screenshots

Here are a few screenshots of what the application looks like, It's simple, clean and beautiful, exactly how it should be.

Add new client

Here you can see the screen for adding a new user, there are inputs for the name, address, phone number as well as the email and website, what I'd like to see in the client list involving the email  fields would be a simple "send message to client"-feature right in the application.

Create Invoice

Here you can see how easy it is to get started with creating an invoice, you simply press the "new invoice" button, fill in the client name, which will show up with an autosuggest drop-down as soon as you tart typing out a name, the invoice date and due date.

Click to enlarge

FusionInvoice also supports recurring invoices, this could be handy if you are hosting their website but don't have a complex billing system like WHMCS integrated with it.

On a slightly related note, go checkout my Top 5 Free CPanel Alternatives post if you're looking for an alternative to CPanel for hosting your own and your client's websites, also checkout my MDDHosting review.

Once you click "Submit" on the lightbox the software will send you to another view where you can enter a product description and price.

Dashboard

Interview with the developer

I asked @JessedTerry, the developer of  FusionInvoice for an interview over email the other day, he promptly obliged and answered all my questions, here is what he answered.

First of all, who are you and what do you do?

My name is Jesse Terry and I live in the U.S. with my wife and our three dogs. I started dabbling with PHP back in 2000, and since then have had a lot of fun building various things with it. My first website I ever built was a single page with about 10,000 lines of PHP and HTML all intermixed together. I'd like to think I've become a bit better since then...

What made you create FusionInvoice in the first place? Was it something you were going to use yourself or did you see a niche that needed to be filled?

A little bit of both, really. Something a lot of developers seem to have in common is that itch to build things yourself.

From smaller libraries to frameworks to full blown applications, we seem to enjoy recreating wheels of all sorts. I was doing a lot of freelance work between 2007-2010 and needed something to manage my invoices so I started using BambooInvoice, but grew tired of it rather quickly and started to get that itch to try and make something better.

In 2008, I started a project called MyClientBase, built on the CodeIgniter framework, and distributed it as free and open source software.

MyClientBase gained a following rather quickly, so I developed and maintained the project through various iterations until 2012 when I rewrote and rebranded it as FusionInvoice v1.

FI v1 carried on as free and open source software and gained even more momentum.

Then came the news that EllisLab was discontinuing development and support for the CodeIgniter framework, so I made the decision to rewrite it yet again, but this time using the Laravel framework. This iteration would be known as FusionInvoice v2 and would introduce the commercial aspect of the software.

Do you have any interesting features planned for future releases of FusionInvoice? I think so, yes. There are some major features being planned to include in what will probably be the 2.5 release or somewhere after. The overall goal of FusionInvoice is to provide freelancers and micro-businesses with a set of tools they can host on their own servers which helps them bill their clients and collect payments. There are definitely a number of additional features planned that can still be added to the mix without sacrificing the streamlined vision of the product.

How many hours have you used on developing FusionInvoice so far? I honestly wouldn't want to even know. Way too many to make any sense, I know that much.

Where do you see FusionInvoice in 3 years? Hopefully on the screens of a lot of happy and profitable freelancers and micro-businesses! Since FusionInvoice v2 was just launched on April 20th of this year, it still has a lot of maturing to do, and a lot of things that need to be implemented and rounded out to provide as streamlined of an experience as possible.

Are you looking for developers to help you with FusionInvoice or is this a one-man project? Currently I manage everything with the project - development and support and everything else. Alex, my wife, graciously helps out a bit with some of the technical support (and moral support as well), but it gets to a point where things go outside the scope of what she can answer. Provided the product continues to do well, the first person I'd consider bringing onto the team would be someone to handle the support. Support always takes priority over development.

What advice can you give to young web developers looking to gain experience and increase their skills? Never give up. Never, ever, ever give up. I guess that response could be applied to just about anything really, but I'm not the most technically proficient or proper developer on the planet. I do my best to utilize certain standards and disciplines, but for me it's about what works in as maintainable of a fashion as possible. So, I don't really feel qualified to give specific technical advice to others, but I can definitely say to have fun, don't give up, and never stop learning. You'll never know everything, and that's ok.

Discount time!

Jesse was nice enough to offer my readers a $10 USD discount on the software , Thanks Jesse!

=> Grab your FusionInvoice Discount Now

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