Like it says on the tin, I’m an IT consultant. One of the things I need to do my job is a decent invoicing system – and, importantly, one that’s internet-friendly – I need to be able to access it from anywhere via the internet, and I need to be able to email invoices. Because of the very agile nature of a small IT consulting business, I absolutely need the ability to write one-off invoices “on the fly” as well, without depending on inventory or long look-up tables of specific parts or services.
That said, I do also offer monthly and annual service and/or hosting agreements to customers, which I have been (actually, my lovely bookkeeper has been) banging out manually each month/year/whatever until now. And some parts and services change infrequently enough that it would be nice to just pick those from a list – particularly if I can override the default pricing set if I need to. So it would be a giant plus for my invoicing application to gracefully handle recurring billing and pre-configured line items as well as one-offs.
There are quite a lot of subscription services which do this kind of thing as a hosted service, but being who I am, I much prefer to host it myself – and if at all possible, I prefer an open source solution as well. Unfortunately, while there are quite a lot of them to choose from, they’re all pretty flawed in one way or another. Listed below are the results of my search, with the one I eventually settled on listed [...]