 We started using InvoiceNinja in March of 2018. We had a messy, as I would call it, custom in-house built system that we had cobbled together over the years. And it really wasn't that nice. My goal was eventually put together an open source one. I was willing to fund the project. And then I ran across InvoiceNinja, a fully open source invoicing platform. And this is my year follow-up. I've done more in-depth videos covering some of the details and intricacies of InvoiceNinja. It's also well documented. They have a great documentation for you to really dig in and start using it. But my overview is actual functional usage of it after a year, what does it look like? So this is an activity report. Now this activity report is not the same as actual numbers of invoices created or number of quotes created. For example, if a quote was created, but then edited each edit counts as an activity. So it's not that often that quotes are revised 20 and 30 times. So there's at least a couple of revisions in a quote. Sometimes quotes are just sent once and approved. But as we all know, clients change things. So the numbers are a little bit skewed, but it gives you an idea of our usage. And I wanna make sure I added that context before I talked a little bit about InvoiceNinja. So we imported in about 9,000 invoices from our old system. We disappointed the businesses. We didn't import the retail side of our business. We did import the retail clients, but the client history for the retail because we don't really do much more than service for clients. We don't really sell products. So it wasn't like we have to track a bunch of product or anything like that from any of the client sales. So we kind of omitted a lot of that. It also made it less work importing all that data. Oh, we still brought quite a bit in. So this right here shows like the current client count. So client count right now is 6,128 clients. The quotes, there's 2,701 quotes in a year, but like I said, that can also count some revisions. So I think there's actually 2,400 quotes, but because it edits, it adds up to 2,701. The invoice activity is invoices get revised and changed. So there's 24,000 in terms of invoices, but I know we're on invoice count number 22,000. Once again, some of those edits adding up inside of there. Payments, about 10,000 payments are logged in the system. And because when we imported all the old invoices, we marked them paid, so it doesn't add like an extra payment field. Basically you're getting the idea that we use this system quite a bit. We have every one of my staff has their own login to it. And our users of the system, I hope will give context. So you understand that, you know, my reviews are not arbitrary, so to speak. It's not like I just started using it and I'm telling you to use it because I have some financial incentive. I do have an offer code below that, hey, whatever gives us a couple of dollars, well-defined, if you wanna help the channel out. But seriously, it's not how we make our money. I'm just sharing with, to help the project out because more users means better code and more money to develop better code from them when you buy it through their system. Well, let's just talk about that. So I love open source projects that have a business model around them because that generally means they're going to be around longer. And the way Invoiceinja works is you can host and have all the code for free. There's two websites, invoiceinja.org, which is open source with all the code. And invoiceinja.com. No difference in code that's used. It just is a hosting platform and this is how they make money. So their forever free plan is where you can start, which is actually kind of cool. So I'm gonna open this up in an incognito window to show you. You go to their forever free program, agree. You can use Awath and use one of these where you can fill in first name, last name, email, whatever. They don't have sales people that hound you and bug you to buy and things like that. Matter of fact, you don't even need a credit card to sign up. So you can try and test out the system, like I said, with the link that I have below and it doesn't cost you anything. If you don't want to use my link, you can do like I did. Just go right to the website and go there. But the link provides some tracking and they like to know if these videos are helping. Anyways, so you can sign up for free and test out the program. That's great. Then they have their Ninja Pro plan for $8 a month. They have the enterprise plan for 12 for one to two users, three to five, so on and so forth. Call them if you have something custom that you want to do or want to get in touch with them about cost of integrations and things like that. Those are different things that they can do. And I'm using their referral program. Like I said, this is all documented. You can find out no secrets here about how any of this works. You know, I'm a big open source advocate. I'm also a big advocate of making sure people are aware of how everything works. I'm very open about things. Now, feature-wise, it's amazing all the features it had when we started a year later. They've added a lot more. They've had a lot of integrations. They have Zapier integrations have been really cool because the way the Larville works, and that's the framework that it's based on, has a complete open API, system-restful API that allows a lot of different extensible plugins. So there's already a lot written. So when you go to look at integrations with Zapier, they have just a handful of like get-just-started type things. But of course, once you have Zapier integrated if you're not familiar with it, it's kind of a cool automation tool to allow you to bring clients in, tie clients thing, put notices and slack for it. You can come up with a lot more. I think if you go to Zapier's site themselves, they have like a couple hundred like predefined what they refer to as Zaps that went a great in there. Payment gateways, massive amounts of them. It's actually impressive how many payment gateways. So they have like the major ones like your Braintree, PayPal, Stripe, WePay, Authorize.net. But then you scroll down here, there's a bunch I never heard of, and that's because they do a great job of being an international program. And this is something I've never thought as much about, but it handles all those currency conversions. And as we've, through my YouTube channel here, have people hiring us in our countries, it's kind of nice to be able to see how this works, where they can pay and their money translated to the value of our money. So we still get our money in the end, but I don't have to think about all those, you know, costs and currency exchange costs and things like that. And as part of the things you can do here, you can set your currency to quite a different varied number of currencies across Europe. They do have, and this is important to note, the option for complete purges, which is a GDPR compliance. So if you need to purge out clientele and their information, their invoices, they do have that as a feature for compliance in which I thought was kind of cool. They do have a mobile app as well. This goes into the tie-in with Larvell. I believe it's built on a platform called Flutter. They have a little bit more information if you want to dig into it, but that's actually kind of a cool thing about the way Envoy Stingia works. When you go over here to Envoy Stingia.org or you want to go to their GitHub, you get to watch everything being made. You can go look through pull requests, projects, feature requests, if you want to get in touch with developers for how things are done. And this is something we've done, is reach out to them when we've wanted things changed, we found anything, or if there's any kind of little bugs found here and there, they're not done, what has not been any security issues at all, but there has been plenty of security issues if you self-host the server. So please self-host with caution. Their documentation is wonderful. When it comes to self-hosting, they put together an entire, how you set it up and how you configure it. But this is just how to configure their product. You still have the backend side that you have to take care of, whether you're running Apache or IngenX as a backend, that is still yours to maintain. They make their code secure, but it doesn't mean the application server itself that you're running, if you want to self-host this, please consider that, making sure you have everything on a SSL and the whole thing set up properly, which is why it's popular for them to have their post-it-themselves option for only, like I said, a few dollars a month. But I just want to do this video like I said, because I'm really happy that we're still using it. I'm not unhappy with anything about the program. I love seeing the progress that's being made on it. There's a few other things coming down the pipe later that we're excited about. I'm hoping them to get the old ticketing system that they've been working on. It's not, it's unlike the roadmap, but it's not there yet. It's going to be a little ways for they have that finished, but it's still our integrated invoicing system that we're as happy with now as we have been when we started and the improvements have been welcomed and the working with the developers has made this project really great. So I still recommend it. Like I said, try it out. You can try it out for free. You can self-host it for free. Their only exception to the self-hosting is they ask that you give them to remove the little watermark at the bottom. I think it's $20 annually, $20 a year for the self-hosted version. But of course it's open source and someone's going to comment, well, you could just hack the code out. And I'm like, yeah, you could. They give the people $20. I mean, if they put this much documentation on how to self-host it, hey, why not? Why not give them a little bit? So I certainly don't have a problem with throwing money at the project and doing videos and some of the things I've done. I'll leave a link to my other Envoy Stingio videos where we cover some of the finite aspects of it in depth, so if you're interested in digging into that, but the documentation has quite a bit you can go through. And of course you can just sign up for a free account and start playing with it. It's a slick system. All right, thanks. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. If you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon, and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post. If you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video, head over to laurancesystems.com where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us. Also, if you want to carry on the discussion further, head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can keep the conversation going. 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