Handle Your Business, All Open-Sourcey Style

We’ve been looking for an online substitute for Quickbooks for some time now, mostly because we run our business off of three computers and the one that has all the invoice info. always seems to be the one that’s 1) farthest away and 2) not turned on. Here’s a great list of online invoicing services, but they all function pretty similarly: You get a free account that allows you to have either a very limited (3-5) number of clients or only be able to send out a small number of invoices per month. After that, you gotta pay. Most sites have multi-tiered setups that allow you to incrementally add clients and invoices, depending on the size of your business.

There are two things I don’t like about doing invoices this way:

1. All the information is on someone else’s server, which could be a problem if your chosen service went away or became otherwise unavailable.
2. I just don’t wanna pay for it. Isn’t there an open-source alternative? (Isn’t there always?)

Heres the answer: BambooInvoice is a well designed, very easy to use program that does exactly what you need it to do, and lets you do it on your server.

Installation

Getting BambooInvoice (BI) up and running was a little tricky, but that had more to do with our hosting provider, Godaddy, than the program (see below). Luckily the forums on the BambooInvoice website quickly provided a solution, and my answer even came directly from Derek Allard, the programmer/designer behind BI. For the record, installation involves creating a mySQL database and modifying config.php and database.php files to show the correct path to the BI installation. Once I got around the stupid Page Not Found error caused by Godaddy, it was all grilled cheese and chicken strips.

killing trees

BambooInvoice is stupid easy to use. It would be great if you could upload your company logo through the program (you have to FTP-it into an /images folder), but other than that, the interface is well thought out and easy to learn. There are even nice charts and reports to track your invoices over time. When you’re done making the invoice, BI lets you print it, export a .pdf or e-mail it directly to your client (So that 30 days later they can pretend they never got it. I’m kidding. Sort of.) Click on the image at left to see a sample invoice.

My only complaint is that you can only have one login account. It’d be nice if we could have separate logins for memory-sake, but it’s not a big deal.

Go get it

BambooInvoice does exactly what we need it to do, without having to pay a monthly fee or surrender our data. Go get it right now.

EDIT: The latest post on Derek Allard’s blog reveals that among other things, one of the changes in the next release will be a custom logo upload. So there.

SECRET FIX: SO YOU GOT GODADDY?

If you use Godaddy for your hosting, when you install BI, you’re going to get a 404:Page Not Found error when you run the installer. After you make sure you’re running PHP5, which BI requires, open up application/config/config.php and correct the following lines:

$config['index_page'] = “index.php?”;
$config['uri_protocol'] = “QUERY_STRING”;

Easy. Thanks again to the BambooInvoice community for solving my problem so quickly.