With Chantelle’s Cookies and Cakes now up and running full-time, we need to start getting more processes in place in order to help the business stabilize and then grow. One of the things we need in order to achieve this is a decent billing/invoice system, particularly now that we’ve started supplying businesses with goods and in order to release payment, these companies then require an invoice from us.
To start off we used the brilliant South African online invoice solution, SnapBill, but unfortunately they have now gone and dropped their more attractive pricing plan offers in favour of a fixed monthly fee, and given our small stature, this fee is currently just not that attractive to us.
So scouring the Internet for a suitable replacement, I stumbled across the open-source, free to use Siwapp invoice system, which anyone can install and run provided they have access to a webserver with PDO extensions installed (It is written in PHP using the Symfony framework in case you are wondering).
A simple upload to your webserver, changing a few file permissions and then running the quick installer that kind of reminds me a little of WordPress, the final result is a very simple, but intuitive piece of software for creating and managing invoices.
It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles true, but given our need to create and manage invoices, this little beauty does the job damn well. So worth checking out if your wife is starting a little business and you’re called upon for some technical assistance! :)
Related Link: http://www.siwapp.org/