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Looks good! And congrats for releasing. Some feedback from someone who recently built a very similar PoC invoice-generator[1]. 1. I'd prefer to have it live-u
by berkes 3y ago
Looks good! And congrats for releasing.
Some feedback from someone who recently built a very similar PoC invoice-generator[1].
1. I'd prefer to have it live-update an HTML view. When I stop typing, it shows what the invoice will look like (by approx.) instead of ending up with 15+ temp pdfs in my Downloads folder.
2. In the EU there's strict rules for invoices. E.g. on numbering, VAT inclusion and so on. Getting this right, is the hard part. A tool like this that works out-of-the-box for e.g. French Invoices or Dutch Invoice to EU company. Getting this right requires a lot of research and domain knowledge. Something that e.g. a French plumber or Dutch Webdesigner will not have.
3. The hard parts of invoicing is not generating the PDF. Nor filling in the blanks in a template[2]. The hard part is getting all the data for point 2 above and then tracking (paid, overdue, reminded, retracted) the invoices correctly. Most online bookkeeping already does all this. Integrated.
4. Including some VAT or Tax lines is a requirement in many (most?) jurisdictions. It now cannot handle it without some weird hacks (desc: "VAT 21%", amount: 1, price: "insert manually calculated number and don't forget to update it"). I understand and applaud not including these calculators. It's impossible to make this general; no software has done this properly; e.g. invoice-ninja requires the user to set this up, but still misses many use-cases/jurisdiction-requirements which then require hacks anyway.
But there should really be a way to include specialised line-items. Discount, VAT, WhateverTax, Travelling-costs. That can be in- or excluded from subtotal, but do add up to the total.
I send maybe 10 invoices each year, so I'm probably your target audience. But I am only allowed (by law) to use such a tool if its either flexible enough to make it fit my local requirements, or opiniated and tailored for these local requirements.
And for me, the real value would be in tracking these invoices (which most bookkeeping tools already do).
[1] my ultimate goal is to manage invoices in a web-base tool, have plain-text-accounting (beancount/ledger) as its "database" and PDF as export; something I'm now managing with a terrible hodge-podge of scripts, latex and whatnot. Where "manage" is to add medatadata&add line-items, then track them in overviews, and consolidate or book them accordingly.
[2] e.g. https://extensions.libreoffice.org/?q=invoice&action_doExtensionSearch=Search https://extensions.libreoffice.org/?q=invoice&action_doExten...