 If you own a business, you're thinking about starting a business or anything in between. One of the important pieces of that business is going to be your invoicing platform. Because if you can't get paid from your clients and you're not sending them bills, you don't really have a business. Or you have a real headache trying to figure it all out and deal with it and people don't want to pay you unless they have an easy way to do it. So you probably rattle them through your head and anytime you're setting up a business becomes one of the sticking points because you become very dedicated to whatever platform you're on. You become entrenched and it becomes part of your workflow. So there's a lot of thought that should go into this and I wanted to throw this out there that this system that I found is pretty amazing and it's open source and it's really inexpensive if you wanted to have them host it. So I don't know how I didn't find it sooner or stumble across it sooner being that I'm a big open source advocate. But when I did find it, I was taken back at the quality of this program. So we're going to talk about invoiced engine today. Invoiced from anywhere, get paid from everywhere. I like that as a slogan, leading open source platform. Really I don't even think they are competitors in this space that are at the level they're at. I've looked around at some of them and one of my problems of a lot of these invoicing platforms that are open sources, they're just kind of hokey. They just don't feel complete or they have lots of like you can tell it's everything feels like a work in progress. This on the other hand, after testing it, because we've been looking at updating our own internal system and doing what these people are doing and we scrapped it, they have done a better job than ours. We're actually going to be working hopefully in the future with them on some feedbacks for adding a few more features. The feature set they have is extremely complete and that's what we're going to cover today is going to give you a top to bottom approach. I have a sign up link so you can sign up for a free account. It'll be in the description below here so you can just click that which is it brings you right to a page. It just has you fill information and there's no credit card necessary. I love that for sign ups because new strange companies don't get my credit card. If I want to test your product holding my credit card is not how I want to test it. Maybe I like it. Maybe I won't. I have no problem paying if I like your product but asking me for my credit card just so I can look at things. They don't do that. So that makes me very happy. So let's just jump into actually doing the review here and show you how it looks. All right. First I will cover pricing. The pricing is really simple, free forever. So it's not even really a trial. You can get up to a hundred clients in here, four professional invoices, branding and customer code. We're going to be playing with the free version for most of this demo because we've migrated our platform to this so I can't play with our system internally for you but I will show you some of it so you can see what it looks like with populated with heavy amounts of data. We have over 6,000 clients we imported into the system. So in case you're wondering about scale on this thing. We imported clients, we imported histories and invoices and everything. It works wonderful. So it's nice fast and snappy even the searches with 6,000 clients are a couple keystrokes away. So here's all the features and that you get and I'm going to read them all to you but work because we're going to cover them. Then you have the pro version which you do get a 14 day free trial of this which is kind of cool in case you don't like it but all this does is remove like the 100 client restriction and add a few more features. It adds just a handful of little things like attaching PDFs to the client emails and I'll cover how that works. It's kind of interesting because you don't have you can send them just a link to the portal instead of that but they give you some more options in here and then they have an enterprise one where you can choose how many users you have and you get like the whole multi additional user setup because most of this is a single user but if you're a freelancer doing any type of design work or even really anything construction work any service based work this is a good system for that where this is not a system for you if you're going hey will this run my retail store with a scan gun and everything else no that's not what this is this is a web based invoice ink system and somewhat CRM system for following up to your clients and sending them bills for the work and services you offer but it's not like a inventory system with that new scan gun so just clear that up if that's what you were looking for sorry this review you may find it interesting but it's probably not a fit for what you're doing you need something different for that. Okay enterprise like I said they also have the ability to add attached third party files to voice some quotations and they got to sign it for that now I mentioned open sourcing you're like Tom you haven't said anything about open source here well let's jump over to GitHub you can and they have instructions on this you can completely self host this that's really cool this is a Linux backend if you want to get to the technical details of it it's built built on Laravel which is a really cool platform for the framework they built this on it's extensive you can see all the source code by the way these guys know how to do code my friend did some code auditing on it before we brought it in-house because we're actually using a self-hosted version and he was impressed so after looking through the code on it okay these guys actually structured everything right and active wise wow if you are into you know just show you over here feature request just all kinds of things these guys reply very very quickly to anything in here I've had a question I actually solved it myself some things that occurred but I created the problem playing around with the code but these guys even in that category immediately responded to me so I'm really impressed with their interaction they are highly highly active in their forums are highly active on GitHub so they're iterating fast and they have update processes so that's that being said the back end of these of this system is outstanding and if you want to self-host this you can but I will warn you because you're building a web facing application do it securely do it right so think about that before you decide to self-host and if you don't want to deal with any of the self- hosting things that are involved in setting it up and all the things you have to maintain you can completely just use theirs for $8 a month and not have the headache let's talk about a few of the things that are in here because the integrations are really interesting so they support all the major payment gateway integrations so were you actually using PayPal so people can pay our invoices we just like it it's simple but they support Braintree which is the PayPal company for if you have recurring service fees let's say you're like a you have a hosting company you want recurring fees you can actually set up a whole Braintree recurring system on that auto invoicing they support Stripe, GoCardless, Authorize.net so these are the big ones and they have 40 plus so this is they support for international stuff just a lot of different things in here for payments which is important because now you have all the payment options to make it easy for whatever you may already be using and you can integrate with them and they have some kind of generic API so you could work with whatever payment system if they have like a standard interface you could configure that and make it work so pretty cool they have that they do have a desktop app for the time tracking which I think is interesting I've played with it I like doing it in the web interface but in case you're wondering they have Windows Mac and Linux support so they support all three major platforms and it's basically like a simple portal that for the time tracking module which we'll talk about and it integrates into years that's kind of neat they also have phone apps and the phone apps are kind of cool I'm not I I don't hate on them but I find with using the web interface a matter of fact because their system is friendly on mobile you can just use the mobile on your phone and it works so just throwing it out there but we played around the phone apps okay maybe we'll dig into it in the future but they do have it so they do have that as an option so if you're on site at a client you can just pull up the app and send them a bill and they can pay the bill and you'll see the workflow all right so that's enough talking about this by the way they have great documentation and they're always adding to this I kind of like living online documents because as the as they add features or change things they just update this so you always have the most current features listed here and by the way and the self-hosted they have if you are going to do it this way they have lots of guides they link to so DBN CentOS a bunch of Apache they have a Docker file soft delicious installer if you wanted to put it right into your back into your website so lots of options here lots of detail and I'm I'm impressed with it so they have you know even walkthroughs on debug so it's not like they're just trying to push you into hosted in our cloud they give you here's all kinds of stuff PHP fatal errors to leading bootstrap cash services I mean a there's a lot of information in there so if you are wanting to host us yourself absolutely go ahead they have all the stuff in there so anyways they have all of all that so let's jump into what the system looks like now all right once you've signed up app dot invoice ninja dot com dashboard is where we start at this is for the free sign up one like I was using the free one here and we're gonna run through the settings by the way just so you know like the way these collapsible menus and stuff like that the way they've done all this oh is it just it's kind of pretty now that we've been using it for a while on our side in production it's the intuitive design and layout really nice we did some customization to ours because I have the source code so I played around with a little bit but we modifying CSS and things like that they have some options for that which is really cool so the first thing you want to do is it go through set up your company I called it LTS demo invoicing you can put your ID number vet number if you're if you have a value-added tax depending on country codes you're in here in the US we have some similar you can just kind of fill out you know if you want what industry you're in tech or whatever and upload your logo set some default payment types like the default way you want to get paid if that's PayPal and like I said this this list is pretty extensive this isn't where you set up the pay this is just so you can set up a default payment for when people are paying you default payment terms whenever you create a new client a film about payment terms and your default billable rates so that way if you don't you can override this on a per client basis but you can just have defaults fill in so that's pretty cool they also have custom options for invoice due dates things like that so you can customize that more yeah I'm gonna go ahead and save let's say here's the logo so that's all set up there so this is your your basics giving your company a name and things like that user details this is where I set my own user up I really like they have two factor in here I don't have a turn down for this demo but we have a turn on ours that's really awesome so that's really cool so background dark on the sidebars this is kind of a neat thing they have so if I hit save if you want it like colored I like it dark so like there's little tweaks here and I think you just got a novel that they have built in there so when it slides out it's dark and I usually leave this open so we'll leave it open for now localization it what if you are in many other countries they have a great support matter of fact it's something else when we're looking at code they do a really good job all their language files so you can customize this in two different languages and things like that so that's great I'm in the US so we have US dollar we have the time zones in here I'll set my time zone date format I there's some debate about this of course we do it wrong apparently here I never thought about this and till I got older and yeah we have our own date formats here so it's different so date format date time format however you want things to display on there or you can do 24-hour team and then decide if you want Sunday or Monday to be the first day of the week and the first month to be there but they kind of cool so you can customize that then we're gonna go down to online payments this is where you can set the token billing and opt-in opt-out so if you're doing some of the auto bill for people you can enable gateway fee charges this is surcharges based on the way people pay so that's definitely an option whoops I'm gonna save this real quick so turn off gateway fees hit save we're gonna add a payment gateway and here's the list now here's the more options we get in the advanced one so here's like your primary ones are custom then you got more options and you can choose from all these things here I'll see what happens when we add a gateway and PayPal PayPal Express being one of the easiest ones you go here if you click here it takes you right to your API signature key so signing up for PayPal Express is probably one of the easiest ones to do if you're doing started you get an API username password and signature and when you click here it'll bring those you also have a test mode where you can kind of like demo things so you can play with the payments and make sure they're working before you go in there pretty straightforward we had no problem setting that up so that actually was really easy to do leave tax rates this is kind of cool too because you can enable specific tax for invoice we're going to enable specific tax for line items and if you're in a place that has specific tax rates they have that here so you enable specific or specify a second tax rate where you have secondary tax we're happy that we only have one tax include taxes and the cost you can just do this and once the invoice is created you can't change these so it the only effects future invoices in case you started creating a voice and then change this part on there then you can add tax rates and we're in sales is what we have here in Michigan it's at 6% save but customizing options based on where you live you're gonna that's gonna vary products automatically convert product prices to the client's currency that's kind of cool too if you're an international client it's got this as an option so you can do currency conversions it's in there now auto fill products I like this auto update products this you may want to turn on in the beginning what this means is it lets you free form in a product when you're doing an invoice when we get to that but what it'll do is you can start creating those and as you created and build out for a client it can also create the product in there and then you can turn this off later so you you don't mess any of them up I actually like it off because I like to build my products individually and I don't want every new product that we use creating a new product every new line item on an invoice creating a new product entry so I'll show you how that works when we cover it but it does have an option to auto do them we have a lot of users I have a lot of staff using it and we free form a lot of things we don't want it updating all the time notifications email you want to invoice the sent viewed paid this is actually really cool and it has an analyst key for that so we will do is give you a notice whenever someone does any of those actions you get an email which is great for follow-through because you sent that invoice did they see it okay cool they view the invoice you want to know if you're using it yourself or if you have like an auto invoice you may want an email every time it's sent you want to know when a quote is approved they have an entire for your workflow process and you can get notices in your email going hey your quote was approved that person viewed it and of course that's always exciting if you're in business yes they approved it which even better is when you get that email that they're paid that's my favorite email and it allows your clients to do that so you'll send them a quote and a process they can approve it and then the payment option can come up in there so I'll save this this is amazing that they built this in they have a data import and you're probably saying in other places too but they also have a data export and they have a big I mean if you're coming from one of the other payment platforms fresh books invoiceable invoice plain nutcache Ronin stripe wave Zoho you have options to import from them so let's say we had a fresh books file you can then pull in and upload the fresh books format you can have invoiceable Ronin the stripe whatever you're using you can pull in a lot of that information or just a CSV and they have a whole matching system this was made a very easy for us to import all 6,500 of our clients into the system without any hassle it was actually really easy to do so I like that a lot if also that you bring in if you have a list of products that you have on your service you can bring those in there invoices it's got a nice matching system so you can do alignment of all the fields it reads the header row and you drag and you just yeah it's really I'm I don't think I have a file I can easily show you without a customer data in it but trust me it works they have an instruction now and of course exporting data this is really cool you can drop things back into a spreadsheet and download your data out I like this a lot it's a CSV XLS or JSON file and you can then export it imported matter of fact one of the nice things is you can if you source as a JSON file here if you started playing with itself hosted wanted to move back and forth or take your self-hosted instance ago I want to be able to have it internally you can do that or you just go I just want to copy of all the data that I have you want to use their payment system I like the fact that I can get a copy of all the important things in here and keep a local copy of everything in here such really cool leave this page plan status modules that you have turned on now because I have the self-hosted I have a couple things that are extra because they're kind of like beta things that they have which I think is really cool that I get those but take that in stride because they're beta things that I'm giving them feedback on to be able to fix those things so there's a couple features like that they've added so their roadmap is great actually they are very open and follow their blog there they're have a roadmap they're constantly adding features so the system's not just here it is it's looking for feedback give them some feedback suggest things and it ends up in next versions of this this is kind of cool to PDF ceilings you'll see how the live preview works purge data delete account so if you say I've played with this I don't like it I want everything gone you have that ability to do that and purge it here this also let you turn off modules must that you don't use the expense and vendors so if you uncheck these they will disappear from the side over here invoice settings this isn't the pro plan so it doesn't give you a lot to customize it but it does let you come up with and this is where a lot of the customations if you want your invoice numbers to be based on client ID and then a counter for example and what we actually did this was really handy for us was that we pulled in over 20,000 some odd invoices so we wanted to use the invoice counter and put it in there and then we had to start it so we knew the next system you know started after those 21,000 invoices so our invoice numbers still just flow just like they did before so no need to spend a bunch of time like okay we're now moving to a new series of invoices matter of fact other than the way the invoice layout changed from our old system because it looks so much nicer in this one the invoice numbers followed through and we even imported all of our unpaid invoices into the system so it it didn't disrupt our workflow or have to re-index everything because when you pull all the data in maybe from another invoicing system you can fill in the invoice numbers because they don't use them as a unique identifier in the system they have to be unique but they don't you can't import invoice numbers is short of that it also less input quote numbers now they kind of need from the back end perspective invoice number and quote number they actually are in the same table the difference between an invoice and a quote really comes down to status of it whether or not it's something you quoted someone or it's converted to an invoice that's actually a really nice feature from both a programming standpoint and a management standpoint because they look the same so your quote your flow becomes very easy because they're pretty much the same thing you can also set client ID numbers they don't do this by default we like client ID numbers and you can pattern this the same thing counter your user ID so you can come up with special for formats for them we actually just like counter and when I say we have six thousand five hundred clients this is actually something we did so we took the the up to the last client ID that we imported and it did import all of our client IDs and go right back into this pattern we're able to line those fields up and then we started this at the next client number so without missing a beat it all of our client IDs flow through fine which is a really nice because it was very from us moving to one system another was really easy because this is one of the tags we use I've added previous videos where I've shown people and talked about that where I'm using client ID numbers as we just little stickers that we put on things with a pricing gun with their client ID number for all the little things that come in because we are using this for our retail stores well in terms of servicing computers that come in and for our businesses now credit numbers they have a crediting option here when it's not something we use we generally don't have a lot of people that have credit but we have a few so it's kind of cool if they have that in here padding recurring invoices get an R in front of them I like that you can change this though this is customization so when you do the recurring billing it can just add an R so you know they were auto-generated recurring invoices number of zeros for the padding and what that is is so instead of having client 63 you would have client 0063 so you can actually control the padding on here customize that you can reset counters if you want if there was a reason you wanted to I actually don't like it to be reset but if you want to reset for example annually so all of your counter numbers start over that is an option yeah reset the invoice and quote counters custom fields this is a neat feature to me I was really happy they added this in here so you can say field label and was gonna call it field this is some test field well that's way too big so we use a wiki so I'll use that that's actually something we did add so I'll put in wiki here what this does is shows up in the client file and you can do two of them I mean if you leave like nothing shows up if you leave it here it creates an extra spot for you to put data for that client so if you have some reference number that you want to use or some special piece of string it's not a real long field that you want to put in there you can put that piece into each client file and we'll get to it when you get to the client file so that's pretty cool invoice terms invoice footer quote terms this is nice you can just have this show up on all the footers thank you whatever this is a test of the footer and then you can have you know must be paid whatever you can put these terms in here in the same the quote these just were text that shows up at the bottom of every quote now you can customize this on a per quote basis but these are like the default ones that can show up already and then you can go ahead and do that in the same of these custom fields there's field labels for product fields invoice fields a surcharge labels company fields contact just a lot so client contact company in invoice just more customization and you don't have to know any technology at all to do that which I think is really cool you don't really have to go hey I need to know this or need that it just it's all built-in let's go ahead and hit save oh this is I think an advanced feature by the pro plan so that won't let me do this yeah you have to have the pro one to set that which is fine I'm just gonna say it still recognizes the change on there invoice customization it's extensive you can really once you're on the pro plan to customize invoice I'll actually show you that in our portal system how we did ours client portals these are really cool too you get this with the pro version like I said eight bucks a month for the pro version it's not exactly a if you have a business that's not able to cover the eight dollars a month you should yeah that's it's really not much money you can password protect the generate automatically the client portal and how the client login works and put a password so every time you create a client it creates a password for that client to be a login to the portal yeah the portal doesn't actually need a password and I'll talk a little bit how that works it's up to you it's also really does is a lot of them of you quotes and things like that but you got to remember it's not guessable so you couldn't guess my client portal because it creates a unique nonce for each client it's a really long string that when you send it in an email it converts to the client portal for that session it uses session keys so it's as you can see how it has like an account logging key it generates one of these for each time you send the link that's how it tracks so kind of cool so buy now buttons is kind of neat so you can have people buy stuff we're still playing with this I haven't said even up but it's a feature in there so you people can come in login and buy services from you so if you have a client they're on the portal go hey I just want to buy this add-on service and you know you can sell them more stuff templates and reminders oh this is really fun you can build how all your templates for telling people for quote email payment emails payment received we have a nice thank you notice every time someone gets a payment from us and it sends them a nice thank you for doing business with tells them like you paid with check number this because we do a lot of B2B work so we have a lot of checks mailed to us but if they pay on PayPal the same thing it's a notice that goes out to them thank you for doing business with Lauren systems here's the quote that you want we have a nice custom for this with an email signature so when you send the quote or an invoice email it's all about personalization and they give you you click here and it tells you these are all the different view link view button payment link payment button so you can customize the email they get sent out however you want with your email signature with your account and it fills in names like a form letter so thank you client whatever so pretty neat that they have that in there and we use it it definitely works great credit cards and banks I haven't really use this feature but they do have a way to track your expenses and stuff like that this is just weird they have a data visualization and it's interesting because you can look at clients and products and have anything in here it's in a pro feature it's it's kind of neat it'll break down percentages for what you did it's kind of novel it's not to me the most useful thing but it's there it's kind of neat maybe someone won't play with it this is a really neat system we haven't really started using but we're looking at it they have a lot of automation options to connect it using a Zapier so you can have things like create invoice clients from Gmail add a new invoices to client to your mailing list so if you have mailing lists as you add the clients that can go into your mailing list you can have Slack notifications and this is something we might will say we're still playing with this part I haven't really configured it but it's cool that they have these integrations so you can say hey I want every time a payment comes in and just throw it in Slack so even you can get the email but a lot of us are using Slack I we love Slack how we a lot of interoffice communication so it's kind of nice and we can have it land in a spot so we can look through the Slack history and okay I see the invoice was viewed or our payment was received that's a cool integration you can have there and I've got documentation on how to do this with all the different features so you can just a lot of integrations that our options here and more can be added user management not much you can do here without the pro version but in our system for example it will let us add remove users a couple side notes on that if you add users to the system you can't reset their password they have to request the password reset link so if one of your users if you're using them the enterprise version we have multiple user options you can do this you can have a password reset but by the way it will it didn't I didn't see an option for you to do it as the admin they have to hit the button and request it you can delete and change users and lock users out and things like that you just don't really have the option to reset their password I thought was not a bad idea they don't have to bother you for it at least because if they forget their password to log in which hopefully they don't they do it but if they forget their two-factor I'm not sure the process on that because I didn't see a way to reset two-factor which is good too and I'm glad they don't have a way to reset it thank you that's a security problem it should be if someone lost their password under two-factor and can't get in good because you don't want some easy way around that and so emailing a password reset and having two-factor will not bypass the two-factor like I said that's that's really important to me I rather see someone locked out where you got a context of higher levels of support because there is a way from from the self-hosted version for example you would actually have to go into the database and do it and I'm fine with it being that hard to do because it should be that hard to do the other option to delete the user and reset back up so definitely options there and on to user management a little bit yes they have some granular permissions are not extensive so but you can lock you can do some locking on there all right we're gonna jump over to the dashboard and move into some of that and then we'll walk through the process of adding a client and making it all happen all right now on to the dashboard yes it's blurry because this is our live dashboard with all the information on here I just not gonna share all my payment information sorry guys but I can tell you that there's a lot in here so with our things I can tell you about we have just a ton of invoices like I said we're at invoice the last invoice was two twenty thousand seven ninety eight so we're just under twenty one thousand invoices in here and the system works great now on the dashboard view the blurry chart that you see is showing some of the revenue information on the things like that so you can look at your daily revenue in revenue out and expenses if you're using it to track any of those and they show up across there and you have little menus here to say just kill me in it what it these menus to exchange a view of that dashboard to be how many days this year last year custom range this month or just last 30 days the nice thing like this month if you're trying to set revenue goals per month you can watch the month get built out across there and you can see if you're hitting those goals for money in and money out so it helps with some of the sales things that help a lot of business with dashboards so you log in you look at it okay have we have we invoice out enough and hit those revenue goals and things like that so it looks like populated now we're gonna move over to the demo one again so we can actually show you what it it looks like without the blur over it all right now it's not blurry you have your activity recent payments invoices past to upcoming invoices I don't have any quotes in here but it'll show the same thing for the quotes so let's add a product real quick before we add well we can add a client and a product so we'll add the product real quick to show you how that works so product and we'll call it just service or let's call it design work and you can have notes of what goes in there you can leave these blanks we're gonna leave that blank there's no tax rate on this the cost for design work is 150 we measure things hourly so there's that one let's create a new product another one on site service and these being serious and we charge let's say 150 also for that to come out and do it and we'll make it 200 hour feeling expensive here our bill rates not quite that high yet but with inflation so here's a couple of them and let's do one more product all right so I built a more complete product so you have here load system create volumes set up file sharing you can put a cost on that let's save so now we have a couple different products we have here now let's start with adding a client I have myself in here but let's actually add a new client now the design consistency of this is really nice because you have to sit the plus here for a new client or you can go a new client here and if you notice as you go through all of these new product invoice new invoice you kind of get the idea enter payment throughout the whole system all the outside of the settings everything's got a really nice design consistency so if it's a product new project quote credit recurring nice nice way to do it they actually have you go through the help menu they have keyboard shortcuts to take you to these things I forget all of them right now and they're not relevant but you you actually can navigate a lot of this with the keyboard which is kind of cool too and is including a new client and also when you have this expanded out which I usually leave it there's the ad new client new product knew that so you can from the other menu let's go here we'll create a recurring invoice from right there go back over here and create a client so now we can create a client or listen your clients so here's a new client and I got some stuff I'll paste in here so we're our new client is Dewey Cheaterman how for those of you that are fans of car talk if you remember that show at all and this is an actual address in our city so Troy Michigan 4808 for this is a real road and for those of you wondering it's it's always yes there's plenty of jokes it's even exit 69 a big brief of a road that is the legit exit number for it we'll put in a fictional phone number here their website is probably going to be this if this probably is a real website don't well so we'll put in Dewey Cheaterman how calm first name and I guess we should probably copy and paste some too lazy to type all this so he'll be Tom at that phone number within our fictional phone numbers alright if they have an ID number of that number that can be in here those custom contact things they extra fields to show up under here with whatever labels you gave them with the same link so that is that option that you can add we talked about this isn't the pro version so that doesn't show up in there but it does show up in ours so there's that person if we have more than one contact let's add the second contact and he's gonna be right at and why not same phone number one digit up you can set the payment rate you can see is great in and filled in so it's got a default show tasks in the client portal we'll go ahead and say yes to that notes on this kind of public and private notes classified a client are they for what I think they're a 1 to 3 person look at two contacts here accounting and legal save and yes there is the Google map which I think this is cool integrates if you want to know right where these people are and yes that is a real address it's at big beaver and crooks a Dewey Cheaterman how why not be on crooks off a big beaver so he's gonna cool that this shows up on here you can start seeing the invoices payments activity the activity lists are really cool and we jump over real quick to our system now something I'll show you here we have like I said 6,000 clients watch this I typed in test okay now we can unbler it it just indexed all of our clients that fast I'm not running some incredible super server that's super super fast it's reasonable but the system works really well for that so when you pull up this client and this is just a testy McTess face is the demo client whenever we have to test something inside of our system it's it's pretty cool because you can see payments and voices activity lists for everything that was done so 5,000 paid 5,000 deleted it gives you a whole history of everything that was done on that client may change it to whoops deleted draft active and archived and it can show you all the different statuses for things in here so you can see an idea I think we have deleted invoices for this yes here's a bunch of them so this populates really fast we're gonna do some of the demo here but it just to show you real quick how they look when you're doing them and by the way they don't currently have it's on a roadmap a way to purge deleted it probably be an admin function so with some winning that tries to go through and delete one of the other staff members deletes an invoice they're still there they just don't show up on the revenue reports but they they exist and you can always go find a deleted one which is actually something I really like I don't ever want to purge deleted because I there's usually a reason I want to know a story of why they were deleted and you can run reports to find things people deleted and I want to know why they deleted them so that's just from a business standpoint I like the fact that you can delete but deleting them still makes them attached to that client so you can go wait a minute why did someone delete these obviously I don't question when we delete invoices for testing a test space but that's the yeah it's a nice feature alright so we've added our client and we want to invoice that client once again kind of cool things you can view a statement of this client for all the money they spent with you you can edit the client or new task quote invoice so you can enter payment credit expense for this client I like there the main user right there and once again I could start from here it whichever way you want to do it so we'll go ahead and say new quote now first things want to know is how many people if you have a lot of context you have to do some unchecking but it does remember what who is related to this so this is only for let's say this one's gonna go to Ray it's a quote for something design work I'm just gonna free-form in some design work pretty simple we're gonna set up a free NAS system and that one you notice how it fills in for us and in real time down here you're seeing the invoices being or the quote being built another quote name voice I guess it's very much very similar and they have a few built in then on the free version we can make it look like this modern plain and more designs is takes you to let's buy the bold version they also with the pro version give you a tool to customize and design your own layouts they have a whole layout system so you can if you want design it I kind of like the bold look it looks pretty nice looks looks professional but you can see it's automatically updating this in a little PDF below so and it puts this if you're not paying you get the created by invoice ninja tagged at the bottom of all your funds you don't get this of course with the self-hosted and also something else you see here it says public notes private notes terms and footer they would be default filled in when we went through setup or they show up here I mean you can just free-form them and private notes something about this client and then we're gonna do some public notes this shows up on the invoice and quote and you can save this as draft now this is where from your workflow now I've saved this as draft it's got an ID number quote oh one like I said ours are following the invoice numbers so they're much higher you can market ascent as and you physically gave it to them or normally you're gonna want to email it please send oh I can't do it in a free version so I'll go ahead and mark I'll go over to our version so you have it in our system and I'll show you how you can do the quotes and we're gonna use our testing mid-text-face one so I can show you the email process on ours but this is actually kind of a cool thing so the other one I started from the client and created a quote but you can fill in a quote so I'm gonna blur out the other names that show up but you can actually it finds that word in there and I'm blurring out the other client names that have the word test in there because there's some companies that do prosthetics so that they're actually in there but we can actually then click on it and now it fills in for that customer automatically and if you wanted to edit that client or view that client or if you notice before I entered any of this create new client that's a nice thing you can start with a quote and build out the client file without ever leaving the screen so if we view this client it did pop up a new window but yes you can view a client from there and actually let's just make a change to the client and when you do a change I can actually go in and edit something about this client and we're gonna change like their payment terms and at 15 done and now we just updated that client file so that's actually a nice thing without leaving the screen I can just go okay I found McTesface client but I want to edit that client and go from there so here's your quote valid blah blah blah all the information now let's fill in this and we'll actually fill in one of our standard things we do so we have like here backup customer documents format data and we want to email this as a quote and you can see it building the quote here I'll save it as a draft sort of refreshes so this is what the client will see and then when you pull up the email option thank you for your interest in working with Lawrence technology services we have a quote for the services we appreciate a positive zero zero dollars let's actually fix this so nope that isn't what I wanted to send so we go here and I need a deposit of $40 to get started started here and click on email quote we'd like a deposit of blink to get started generally a lot of the work we do that we're sending an email for requires a deposit but you can then if you want on a per quote basis is the default that I let my guys send but if you want to add something in here and you notice how it says dollar cent account dollars and partial view button view link email signature history of how many times it's been sent and we have reminder emails that we've got template course as well so if you're using a pro version you get all these features which is really cool I like it it also does not have the right link at the bottom here on purpose because I'm playing with it when we send it I did this for purposes of this demo it will put the right link in there so they actually send them a link and then when they get the email they get the client portal email so they can see these quotes and stuff like that which I'm gonna pull that up next so I'm in a market ascent I'm actually not send an extra email so for those you interested in the technical details this is actually what the link they get in the email is so it's your portal name index PHP client dashboard and a long unique key so as you know some logged in Cognito show I'm not logged in at all to the in ninja invoice system and this allows it to view things so this they can see their invoices their payments and things like that you know so it takes it out up here so they just see this once they're logged in it creates a session key that expires if they close this portal and try to open up again so I think if I open this I think it's the same browser session so it'll work but once you close the browser session they lose it until they click the link in the email again now this is the part where you can add a password to if you want so they actually have to click the link get a password and log in but only thing they can do here is view their quotes and potentially approve them so this is where the client gets they can look at it now with the pro version you can attach a PDF as well I kind of like when they view it in a portal if you touch PDF you don't know if they looked at it when they click the link you get a stat that they viewed this they can download it so they can print it for their own records or we're going to go through approval process so we'll approve this invoice and it takes a second to think and then we're gonna get a notice that it was approved it may give an error because I'm the way this is working right here but you get the notice okay it did work even with that URL and then I can actually click on pay now and it takes them right to the payment terms so they can now pay that deposit that we asked for on there and then they'll have an invoice that they can pay so I can say pay now on this and it's gonna take them over to PayPal so I'm not going and then we have on the invoices unpaid so now we went from we had the quote I can see that I approve this quote that we just created then we have our invoices and it set a invoice date due date based on that scent and now they can click on this and pay it and for some of our bigger clients this is cool because there's so much going on with them they can see the entire history and payments and everything that they've done in there and we see that this is now converted they have an active viewed but not paid invoice with us now so that kind of gives you the workflow and follow through of how that works and I get said I'm really impressed with the way the system can handle all of that it's really really clever so you can see how the whole process and workflow does so back to our demo client over here so there's the quote and let's pretend the quotes approved so we'll mark it as sent we can list the quotes there's our do we cheat them and how quote here's an amount we know it's sent we can convert it to an invoice now so you want to invoice them or bill them and then they would be able to pay it so pretty straightforward if they have a recurring invoice they go we like your service you want to do it and we want a new recurring invoice hit new invoice there's our do we cheat them and how who gets it remember Ray last time we can actually tell it to get each person and we're gonna say we want to set up a web hosting and this is where you can freeform the products or put it in there site 120 quantity one there's no tax on that and once again we can turn it on for let them opt in and out of it but we're gonna say always a start date tomorrow morning by default it's set to 8 a.m. is when it sends out all your recurring invoices you want this invoice to be we said annual so we're gonna said to be annually and boom you can now hit email invoices or just hit mark ready which means it'll tell you the next time it'll the email we sent on March 8th the invoice to be emailed to and that creature recurring invoices we use this a lot this is how we do all of our managed clients and things like that set them all up on recurring invoicing this is kind of neat because you can't have people with an option to opt out or opt into billing so you can bill them they can then opt in to be auto build I just like always just we bill them if they call us if they don't want billing anymore we interact a lot with our clients if you have systems that you don't you want them to be able to opt out of it you can add that as an option generally you want to keep them in the billing system is my theory once we have this and we're gonna go ahead and leave because I don't care about creating this one let's go back over to our quote and invoice it so we did this we sent it convert to invoice great it's in draft because it brought us to the invoice let me actually we go back over and click it and we're gonna market a scent because we can't email it but that means we sent them the invoice now they have it oh by the way if we go to view client and we can go to view their portal here's their total invoice paid to date their current open balance so I can show you this portal and it's total they have one invoice no okay no data and table maybe it's because I'm on the demo one so they know that they have an open balance with us you can send that to them so we'll go back over to invoices sent and we want to enter payment for that invoice so this is just part of the workflow it but we typed in PayPal so the PayPal's the default but you can of course just change this out check check I just wanted to quickly add that if they pay online via one of the invoice portals such as PayPal you don't have to enter the payment it actually enters it for you in fills in the transaction ID reference for example because we use PayPal it puts in the PayPal transaction ID in here put that in there we do this right here for our business clients is the email receipt that's back to the templates you can set up and now you've closed out that client with they now have a payment history so there's a completed payment completed job kind of takes you through the process and if they had a credit because they overpaid or some reason you can just easily add a credit and then apply the credit so it does have an option for that projects this is kind of cool so we're gonna create a well actually delete this one new project client do each treatment how name of the project new free NAS server due date they would love that installed by the 15th budget hours I'm thinking it's gonna take 50 hours of work task rate maybe you negotiate it a different than default so you have an option do that as well 50 hours would go ahead and throw that in there all right so now we have this project now the project needs some tasks so first task project through to build a new server now this is kind of cool you can mainly enter I plan to start it at 940 I should be done by 11 or you can just type in the hours so let's actually change this so then set it at 910 to 11 it's one hour it's probably take us more than an hour to build it so let's be a little bit more generous three hours so awesome save now that's for this task now we've built this maybe it took more we resume it later it will actually then let you do that so you can then jump back over to tasks I need to leave these other ones so we only have one thing to deal with here all right so here's the build the new server task duration select it's logged so I have one more task in here client whoops free NAS server and copy files to a new server we don't know how long it's gonna take we're just gonna hit save and leave it leave it empty and I'm gonna go back over to tasks so now this is log duration here resume task invoice task let's pretend we did it we can actually invoice this particular task or just resume the task but this does let you invoice that little piece of it now we also have and I'm probably saying it wrong Kanban Kanban ready to do we'll move these to ready ready we'll actually move this one in progress and this one should be ready once this one's done and this is kind of cool so if you can list out all your tasks and projects then build them out like this leave and throw them all on a calendar for you so this does have some built-in project management so you can kind of flow through with what you're doing and the client let's pull up the client file the client can see where you're at with the task so they can actually go into their client portal links and say oh I see where they're at with the process so if you get annoyed by clients you call you thought where's my website at you're able to go through here and do that which is really cool so let's jump on down to the task show quick here this is kind of neat since now it says in progress backlog and this is all done through here dragging it along and that's tied to the project that's right here and we click the project we also get a project dashboard and you can start doing this now the only thing it doesn't really have is a lot of neat assignments for each person so you don't necessarily have these cool list of who's working on it so it's kind of a basic project management but especially for an independent it works really good for that so you definitely have that as an option in here so copy files a new server that Tom spelled wrong it's in here and here's the one here and you can also hit this is where the resume tasks so let's actually invoice this task out invoice task mark sent done you notice how it all filled in based on the rate for that project so it just fills it all in new free NAS server and you can edit and change all this as needed oh by the way if you change an invoice like we sent that invoice let's save it again you do get invoice history so if we look through now that we've created a history because this does happen scopes of work change here's the original invoice we set them but I forgot to add a service description so then here's the revised one and of course we it changed your rate when I I did that so now we can see both invoices and go back and edit them so yes it actually keeps invoice and quote history works the same way if you've created revisions after you've sent them to the client it has a log of those revisions I don't think the client can see the alright is verify the client only sees the last version of the invoice so they only see the laser so if you send it but you really quickly updated they only see as long as they didn't view it they never seen the original version just to throw it out there so that's how you can invoice the tasks out the other thing you can do with the task like I said we don't know how long this task will take so we can actually go into the task and time it so we can actually kick off things I should fix this copy files to new server so this is where that had that I talked about that had an app it ties into this yeah you just can hit here and copy files new server or whatever you're doing you can start and stop the tasks and go from there and we got it what cancel make sure we save running please note I moved away from the site and I can go back to it later and it's measuring out the duration that I do it until I come back and stop it so you can actually kick off tasks and not have to leave that web portal open that like I said the app they have it kind of gives you a little view of that but pretty neat it then when you're done with the project you know how long the project to then you have the time tracker which pulls up here so you can see each little thing in a pop-up window that are starting and stopping and you can list out the tasks and filter them right here this is actually a web view of what the system looks like so you can move this out over wherever you want on a screen start and stop it we're going to stop this task but you can see if you're working on a bunch of small client projects makes it really easy to be able to do that you can click on here to see the project you're working on and we can resume working on it we started using this for some of our hourly billing stuff because we can have the clients pull up and if I'm working on a project my guys can do each one of these and just hit start and stop the billing and then when it's all done I'll show you what that looks like so we actually start and stopped it twice so tasks it lists the times out in here so if we zoom again stop save and what you're seeing here whoops I brought myself back to dashboard one second let me back at tasks because I hit submit twice on a page there we go so here's the duration that we've done it on the start and stop and we can go ahead and invoice this task or add it to the existing invoice that was created based on this task so if you save invoices a draft you can keep cumulatively building on those invoices which is actually a nice feature so you if you have all these buildings you can start the invoice then you do it and this is actually a lot of how we do billing I'm probably gonna do a separate video just on how we handle things but this is one of things we'll do we'll keep cumulatively adding to an invoice until we know the project's over and then maybe the next day finish off that invoice because we have like a little bunch of little things we're doing for a client you can start and stop all the tasks and you can cumulatively just keep adding them all in here so we're gonna add it to that invoice and this is what I wanted to show you here at the end here is all the times you worked on it so let's save this invoice again and what you're seeing is when you put three pound signs in front of something it has a really basic markup language so here's all the times they show up in like a smaller font and if you ever want to customize things for a bigger font you can also do this like this means bold and you see how that's now in bold so you can do that and that's what why it does that on there but also you may want to increase the billing time we only you know we're for two seconds a lot of time you have minimums I don't think they have a way to set that yet but you can just override and type it in so look I know I cumulatively worked on it for point oh two hours but we have a minimum of a 15 minute billing time and you can do it he's got to think about an hour so point two fifteen minutes to be point two five and you can you can type in decimals for the hours in there so and then we'll go ahead and save this invoice go back to our tasks and or even look at the project so you can look at this project and you can start seeing all the tasks the time spent on it until we hit our 50 hours total duration I'm really impressed it's got all this built in here for the project and if you're using a few if you know you're doing web development you time a lot of the time you spent developing or coding so it works really well really really well for that and the last thing I'll cover is the reports here so you have an entire list of reports for clients aging documents attached and stuff like that payments products profit and loss profit loss of course is just based on the expenses you entered and the vendors you entered not not the most extensive system for that but you can use it we actually start what probably used for some of our contractors so we can attach a contractor as an expense to a particular project or job that we hired out so you can track that our business the size that we're at we're probably a little bit too extensive to use we have a very much more complicated ledger to our size with lots of expenses and categories so but if you're getting started great place to start is here you can always export it output and something else later or just keep using it but as a great system I'm overall really happy with invoice ninja the fact is open source and I can self-host it is something I love the fact that they make it really easy for you to set it up and please if you do host this yourself like I said think about the security before you end up with a mess of getting hacked this not that the system is insecure but if you put it on a unpatched system that you have public-facing on the internet without proper filters in front of it you could have problems that the software itself the larval framework everything these guys care about security they've done a great job all the pastors think that are all hashed so from a back end standpoint they built a really nice solid product with good security in mind but if you do self-host it you do have to think about those things but hey for eight bucks a month they'll host it for you so if you're getting started this is a really inexpensive way to get you going on stuff I guess the last thing I'll cover is interface I didn't cover this little slide out here but they do have this it remembers the last things you were working on which is kind of cool so wherever you were in the system it it's just a little history thing on there but that's invoice ninja it's it's an impressive system now we're starting to get some stuff in a dashboard so you can see that invoices and payments because we mark something paid it's a great system you can grow into a system we have a lot of files in this and it works really well I will do one last thing and to show you the speed of it on ours so sorry gotta blur things out but for example if I have to pull up a client that we're working on it lets me I can type in a client name and I know I have to blur these out it's all over companies near it will index and pull up our clients contacts quotes so we did something for testing my test face I can just type in part of their name over here and just pull it up and jump right to it so having that at the top let me land this on here that's great so it is fast to use like I said we've got 6,000 something clients here and we have no problem 6,000 clients almost 21,000 invoices it just blazes through everything here and lets you see everything so great system if you have questions leave in the comments below I got the sign up link in there it's like a referral link so if you if you like to invoice ninja go ahead and sign up off my referral link they show me a little love show them a little love for the system and sign up for the free one no credit card required you can just play with it and go wow this is open source was kind of what I said I'm not sure a dog an open source project but I haven't seen an open source invoicing project that was quite as good as this so I'm actually pretty impressed with it all right thanks for watching if you like to kind of hear likes and subscribe