Do My Invoice

We’ve thrown a few ideas around at the office, for development projects we could do after hours. The idea was to come up with something interesting (i.e. techie) that’s different enough from the contract we’re working on that we’d be able to keep motivated.

Most of the ideas were far too ambitious (i.e. would require the resources of a Google, or significantly more development effort than we could commit), until someone came up with the idea of designing something we ourselves would find useful. Which is one of those simple, rather obvious ideas which we probably should’ve started with from the beginning.

That opened up a whole different “can of discussion worms”, with the end result being that a few of the guys went in one direction, and I went in another. Which is a roundabout way of bringing me to: “Do My Invoice“.

What I decided I really needed was a simple way to record timesheet information (outside of the client’s timesheet system), which could then be converted into an invoice at the end of the month. To me “record timesheet information” means a simple email interface, because if I leave this stuff until the end of the week, it’s invariably a time-wasting struggle to remember everything I’ve been doing (of course, that’s not all there is to it… but it is the fundamentals of the idea).

Now, you might argue that any number of packages can be used to accomplish the invoicing side of things: MYOB, Quickbooks, and so on. But since the number of invoices I’m generating in a year numbers in the teens, my accountant has me working from a spreadsheet-based cashbook. His argument is why waste the money and effort on an expensive package I’ll hardly be using — I couldn’t agree more.

I’m equally sure there are other web-based, invoicing systems out there (I already came across one three-quarters of the way through the development), but I have yet to see something cheap and simple enough to satisfy my purposes.

Hence Do My Invoice is a cheap and simple (I hope, user-friendly) web-based invoicing system, with hopefully enough features to make it attractive to spend the US$50 subscription per year. In true eat-your-own-dog-food fashion, I’m using my own application, so new features will be added as, and where, I discover the lack — and so feature requests are welcome. At some point, over the next few weeks, I’ll get some sort of bug tracking software installed so requests can go there (in the meantime info ‘at’ domyinvoice.com will go to the right place).

Feedback and critique welcome — except if it’s regarding the web design (which will be fixed as soon as I have more than just myself as a paying subscriber…)