
Invoice Ninja - campuscodi
https://www.invoiceninja.com
======
brandon272
You should charge something for this. Even if you charged $10/year, it at
least gives the impression that there is a contract and agreement in place
that you will maintain the service and protect and provide the service. I have
no interest, personally, in entering a bunch of invoice data in a service that
might get shut down in a year after the developers lose interest in
maintaining something that they lose money on.

~~~
InvoiceNinja
Hi Brandon! Email is also free, Facebook is free, waze, twitter, etc... We
will NOT be charging a monthly or annual fee for InvoiceNinja.com Email us to
discuss: contact@invoiceninja.com

~~~
patio11
My wife and I loved the logo. Nice sense of whimsy.

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?

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davidjgraph
"About us" should really be.... about you, not some strange mix of "features"
and "technology".

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.

~~~
ericraio
I actually agree to this. Gaining the trust of the user is pretty critical now
a days.

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?

~~~
phillmv
I immediately distrust all startups that don't have a team page with real
human beings on it.

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medell
I love how you've taken the friction out of the signup process and the preview
is great. However I can't use it as because I have the following text on my
invoices:

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 :)

~~~
InvoiceNinja
Great feedback! Can you email more details or to discuss about the Canadian
requires and we'll implement in our next build! contact@invoiceninja.com

~~~
medell
Email sent!

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izolate
Guess what? You can now preorder .ninja TLDs and be invoice.ninja!

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ville
The demo is very fast, I just click a button and I'm in the middle of creating
an invoice in a blink of an eye and it even produces the PDF right away. Good
job.

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?

~~~
trebor
Um, did you miss the yellow block on the left side of the front page? It
says...

    
    
        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.
    

There are references to "Free" all over the front page.

~~~
nobodysfool
Well, this is one product that you can say the developers are NOT dogfooding.

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hillelcoren
Hi, thanks for all the great feedback (I'm the developer of the app).

@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.

~~~
vidarh
Love the inline PDF preview, and overall it's quite clean.

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).

~~~
hillelcoren
Thank you for the excellent feedback.

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/31)
[https://github.com/hillelcoren/invoice-
ninja/issues/29](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](https://www.facebook.com/invoiceninja)

Thanks again!!

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pjbrunet
"100% FREE, ALWAYS" What's the catch? How are they going to make money?
Harvest invoice data? Really the only reason I use Freshbooks is for the
50-cent Paypal invoices but I first create an actual PDF invoice in
OpenOffice.

~~~
shin_lao
I agree with you. Invoicing is pretty sensitive, I need to feel that the
service is going to stay for a while and will not back-stab me somehow.

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amalag
The reason I really like Freshbooks is their API. I use it to create invoices
regularly.

~~~
mildtrepidation
We use the API to enter invoice payments from a Stripe-based payment site we
set up for our clients... it's definitely convenient.

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.

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matthewmacleod
I really like this, obviously a lot of attention to usability.

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.

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hillelcoren
Many people have asked how this will be sustainable if it's free?

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.

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delwin
[http://www.ninjainvoice.com/](http://www.ninjainvoice.com/)

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Kluny
I can't use this unless I know you have a sustainable business model. Maybe
add that to your about page.

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frade33
I instantly shunned it because it is advertised as hosted invoicing CMS. I
know you can install it yourself, and this is where you should focus on too,
like fusioninvoice, which I am very comfortable with at this time.

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.

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rjv
Love that this is open source and developed with Laravel. Great job!

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sailfast
Looks great. Quick bug report - when working on an actual invoice I ran into
issues on FireFox ESR 24. (I would imagine this happens any time a user
restricts access to rendering PDFs on screen or in the browser as objects?) It
pops up the "Open or Save" dialog each time a change is made and the object
fails to load in the window below. Perhaps detecting the issue up front and
then offering a "download" button when complete would be an alternative.

~~~
jweather
Agreed... using external PDF viewers doesn't work with this site at all.

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pauletienney
IMHO about branding: maybe "we" should stop this ninja thing. Edit : "we"
stands for "general dev community" not "invoice ninja team"

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jedahan
An extra space at the end of the email address field errors out with 'please
provide a valid email address'.

Could you trim that field before validating?

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shadowwolf007
The columns don't really line up will in the invoice and website in iOS7
chrome. The description in the invoice bleeds in to the second row. Same with
my account in the top navigation/menu bar.

Otherwise really cool - I will probably use this even though I'm a little less
than thrilled over the name honestly.

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nfoz
If there's one thing I can say about my invoicing app, it's that it's not cool
enough.

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wikwocket
Cool, reminds me of invoiceomatic.io, which has a 'robot' theme.

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).

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mholt
Cool. Ever thought of verifying the addresses to make sure you're not missing
apartment numbers and stuff? SmartyStreets would be happy to donate unlimited
service to your startup for free for a year.

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peteacc
Great idea, small bug in switching currencies. When I change the theme of an
invoice it defaults back to USD and does not revert back to the currency set
in the preferences.

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elwell
Maybe I'm being picky, but 'ninja' in the name doesn't represent the service
as serious which can connote lack of reliability, even subconsciously.

~~~
aytekin
I like it. It is like one of those gawker headlines. You get curious and want
to find out.

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crad
@hillelcoren would be nice to get a BCC of invoice emails. As is, I do not
know how the payment integration presents itself.

Service is otherwise easy to use and looks nice.

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photoGrant
This is fantastic! I have one piece of feedback / improvement.

With the 'due date' field have an automatic +30 days / +60 days / \+ 90 days
option.

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gog
It's broken in Firefox, FF just starts downloading random named PDFs and those
downloads never finish.

Chrome displays the PDF inline correctly.

~~~
Shizka
It works fine for me in FF. It might be due to the PDF reader you've selected
for FF?

~~~
gog
I think you are right, I opted to download PDFs, not to view them inline.

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fmitchell0
great job!

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](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?

~~~
spossy
Very similar layout and functionality to
[http://invoiceable.co/](http://invoiceable.co/)

~~~
stevekemp
The site I keep using is [http://invoiceto.me/](http://invoiceto.me/) which is
nice and minimal.

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viame
This is great! Will test it shortly and probably use it as my main invoicing
app. What are some future plans for this?

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kirbyk
Your site has downloaded 25 invoice pdf's to my computer automatically. Not
functional.

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delwin
Really nice work! Blows my competing product out of the water, unfortunately.

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sotirisk
I have yet to find an invoice app that supports Greek characters :(

~~~
hillelcoren
We're working on it, we're waiting on
[https://github.com/MrRio/jsPDF/issues/12](https://github.com/MrRio/jsPDF/issues/12)

~~~
diegocr
We at the jsPDF Team will be pleased if you help us fixing that issue, rather
than just waiting for it to be fixed.

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taf2
Does it have an API? Also integration with Stripe?

~~~
InvoiceNinja
Our next build (very soon) will integrate with Stripe's API, yes!

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RankingMember
This is awesomely simple and well-designed.

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dfrey
Out of curiosity, why did you choose to write a new web application in PHP?

I'm not a web developer, but everything I hear about PHP is bad.

~~~
xerophtye
now i may be wrong, but isn't Facebook on PHP?

~~~
dfrey
If all the Facebook source code miraculously disappeared, do you think
Facebook would rewrite Facebook in PHP?

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pacofvf
you should apply for a .ninja domain

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okwme
support for other currencies?

~~~
hillelcoren
You can set the currency for the client which will update the invoice. Hope
this works for you.

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lnanek2
....I really don't want to try another invoicing app. There's already dozens,
everything from heavy PayPal, to Intuit Network, to light Harvest...

~~~
ceejayoz
So don't?

~~~
bdcravens
I believe the idea is feedback that invoicing is a flooded market, like
bug/issue trackers.

