Hello Chris,
On 24/06/14 11:15, Chris Smith wrote:
> Hi Andy,
>
> Can I ask what you use to produce the BitFolk invoices? Is it an
> open-source tool chain or proprietary?
Back in the mists of time when I ran my own little consultancy business,
I used a web-based system called SQL Ledger [1]. In it's current guise
it is a full ERP system with a double-entry accounting system at it's
heart, so it's perhaps overkill for what you need. The reason why I used
it at the time was it's awesome invoice creation module. It took some
serious setting up, because it uses LaTeX as the PDF creation engine.
Learning LaTeX is a non-trivial task [3], but in this case it has large
rewards. SQL Ledger could create invoices for me, and automagically
either email them off to clients, and/or print them on demand.
Workflow-wise there are of course much more sophistication to be had,
but in my case I only needed to create PDF documents and fire them off
manually to the few clients I had at the time. The PDF documents created
by SQL Ledger is also absolutely stunning.
If I had to do the above again from scratch, I would probably not go
with SQL Ledger, but use a similar system called LedgerSMB [2].
LedgerSMB as a project forked from SQL Ledger a number of years ago, and
is 100% community-based as opposed to SQL Ledger that has a company
behind it. Other than that there is probably not much to choose between
these two systems, it's just that I always seem to lean towards
community-based projects.
Links:
[1] SQL Ledger:
http://www.sql-ledger.com/
[2] LedgerSMB:
http://ledgersmb.org/
[3] I used Kile as my LaTeX "IDE":
http://kile.sourceforge.net/
--
Regards,
Jan Henkins
