
Show HN: Bx - Slick invoicing, expenses, time tracking & projects - osrec
Hi HN!<p>After a few months of developing a product on the side, I&#x27;ve decided to post it to HN. I&#x27;ll be honest, I am a bit nervous about it as I know how discerning the audience here can be, but I guess constructive criticism can&#x27;t be a bad thing!<p>My project is a progressive web app called Bx (pronounced &quot;Books&quot;). It&#x27;s a tool to help you run your business and includes:<p>&gt; Invoicing and payments (via stripe)<p>&gt; Expenses<p>&gt; Time tracking<p>&gt; Project management<p>&gt; Inventory management<p>&gt; Slick, interactive dashboards<p>It&#x27;s nothing new or radical, but many of the existing tools I tried in my own business felt clunky, slow and dated, so I decided to build something more efficient, using my own business as a guinea pig.<p>I wanted to build the app as a progressive web app (PWA) that provides a rich native-like experience on any device. I also wanted it to be somewhat functional, even when offline. I think I&#x27;ve achieved both to some extent, and now have a single, clean(ish!) code-base that works well in any modern browser, on pretty much any device.<p>Here&#x27;s the link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usebx.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usebx.com</a><p>Please try it out and let me know what you think!<p>Thanks very much :)
V
======
chillybean
Just tried using the free tier to send an invoice - was pretty good. Have to
say, the experience was a fair bit cleaner than quickbooks. Just wondering, do
you render your PDFs on your server or in the browser?

~~~
osrec
Thanks! QuickBooks was something I used as well before I got tired of the slow
interface and terrible payments integration and lack of project management.

The PDFs are rendered in browser using the pdfmake library. I did need to
modify bits of the lib to get it to do what I wanted, but on the whole it's
pretty decent.

------
oilfry
Great work - that's a very impressive UI! To say it's a web app, it felt
totally native on my Samsung phone! Do you mind sharing which libraries you
used to achieve this?

~~~
osrec
Thanks for the kind words!

I worked pretty hard to get the native feel on mobiles. Unfortunately there
aren't really many libraries out there that let you achieve this easily, so I
ended up writing a lot of the animation/transition logic myself - it was great
fun! If I do end up making a bit more money on this project, I intend to wrap
the code into a nice library and open source it :)

------
osrec
In case you want to go straight to a demo, go to
[https://usebx.com/app](https://usebx.com/app) and click "Try Demo"

------
arranf
I love the execution. I'll consider switching.

