Posted by IrishGringo on November 16, 2010 at 4:42am
I have been looking to automate my billing. will probably setup my own ecom solution to do this, but before I start, I'm looking for some sucess stories or ideas. Perhaps there is already something I should be looking at before I start the project.
I just hate to re-invent the wheel.
I figure I will probably do something with OpenAtrium for project management.
Comments
Lots of great options
Please don't create your own billing system unless you are really idle and need a fun non-paying project, or have very nonstandard needs. This problem space has been handled nicely by several products.
You gave no details on what your needs are, so I'll just give some general recommendations.
If you need time-tracking as well as billing, you might try FreshBooks or Harvest. They are both online time tracking/invoicing/payment systems with comparable feature. I use Harvest but have heard great things about Freshbooks as well. They each have free low-end offerings or trials so you can get the hang of it without committing. I believe they both also handle teams - so if you ever hire subs you can set up a login for them, they can track their time, you can mark it up, then invoice. Invoices in Harvest are a joy, and it has a free iphone app for tracking time on-the-go.
If you're on a Mac and want a dedicated (non-web) application you might look at Billings. It tracks time, clients, rates, etc and is quite flexible. Can handle retainers, pro forma invoices, send statements as well. Beautiful invoice templates, and invoices are customizable. My one gripe is that is has nothing resembling daily/weekly timesheet which some of my clients require. There's also a companions iPhone/iPod touch app which is quite powerful.
For project management I don't know if Open Atrium will get you all the way there. My experience so far is it's not ready, but that's not based on much. I would look into Basecamp (free for 1 project, cheap for the next level) and see if it would suit your needs. It's very focused, and just works. Can also integrate time tracking with Basecamp for extra fee. However, Basecamp has no features specific to software teams, like issue tracking or source-code management.
We do project management using Trac, which is free and integrates into our Subversion repositories so we have cross-referencing between our tickets and our commits. If you don't want to set all this up for yourself, you can get a full-blown project management solution plus Subversion or Git reasonable from webenabled.com or Assembla.
Hope this sparks a good discussion!
I was looking for just such a debate...
and thanks for the comments.
more than anything, I want to create a proposal system. Something that will allow me to create a CCK type, that fills out a PDF contract. From there, I would keep proposals that would be exposed to the clients.
Then a separate project management system.
But I do more iPHONE and ANDROID stuff now, and generally just do fixed fee projects.
but all good stuff... thanks
I'm also looking to automate
I'm also looking to automate my proposal creation. Let me know if you find anything.
Jason Graham
http://www.PolishYourImage.com
another use case...
I have a situation that I will have to replicate a lot.
A setup fee, then a monthly fixed fee, kind of like a subscription.
I was also thinking of selling credits that would apply to projects. Kind of a prepay system.
Freshbooks is awesome
I use Freshbooks and short of a full accounting solution it's really, really good. You can create recurring invoices, hook up to a variety of payment services and it has a well documented API, as well as multi-currency, time tracking, staff, projects, estimates, various reports, expense tracking... I haven't integrated it directly into my workflow but it really is a great platform. There's a nice iPhone client called MiniBooks too...
Another vote for Freshbooks
I'm another happy FreshBooks user. Their tools seem to fit what I need very well. They have an "estimate" feature that might integrate nicely with IrishGringo's use case. In fact, there appears to be a decent FreshBooks API integration, and if that were combined with something like FillPDF I'll bet this would get really close.
If all you want is to present a proposal to the client, you could just keep the proposal in FreshBooks, and link to it using the API. You can grant customers access to their proposals in FreshBooks and you'd be done. Alternatively, you could pull estimate data in and build a custom PDF in Drupal.
Good luck! This got me thinking about my setup as well.
*_*
There is a drupal module storm, which offers time traking, project, team and tasks managment. You can add as many as clients/organization and you can send invoice too.
Take a demo at http://groups.drupaldeveloper.in
Regards.
BeautifulMind
I'm late to this thread but...
You should check out Redmine, an open-source project management platform. I've been using this for a couple years now to manage simultaneous project/proposals plus invoicing. If you take the time to set it up and use all the features, you can do everything from planning your statement of work, assign time estimates, track time against estimates, connect your tasks/deliverables to cvs or svn; print out or export your time (along with related metadata). A real time save, plus it helps organize your teams on the fly. I've found it to be much more useful than just about every other product out there, (with the exception of AtTask, which is a fantastic, if somewhat expensive, commercial project manager). I occasionally use OfficeTime (which integrates with iCal on the Mac) for some smaller jobs or fixed payment jobs, but for more complicated project, redmine is great (http://www.redmine.org/).
Yet another vote for
Yet another vote for FreshBooks.
Currently part of the team at https://lastcallmedia.com in a senior Drupal specialist role.
Freshbooks & Redmine
I'm currently using Redmine and its great for tracking issues.
And I just love Freshbooks!
Drop me a line if Fill PDF
Drop me a line if Fill PDF makes it into the mix. Always interested in hearing how it is being used!
WizOne Solutions - https://wizone.solutions - Drupal module development, theme implementation, and more
FillPDF Service - https://fillpdf.io - Hosted solution for FillPDF
Been with Freshbooks for 3+ years
Been with Freshbooks for 3+ years. Very happy with product and support is top-notch! Still waiting for Android app :-)