Simple open source Invoicing systems

Thursday, 10th December 2009 7:11am
Over the weekend I had to look for a simple open source invoicing system which I could run on my own server and I managed to get a chance to look at four.

The four that I found were Bamboo Invoice, Simple Invoices, Siwapp and jBilling.

The four systems are all open source with jBilling being a Java application but the other three are all PHP based.

I found Bamboo Invoice to be good and simple and meet my needs which were to be able to create an invoice, get a pdf version of it and be able to send an e-mail from the application and on top of that be able to host the application myself.

Bamboo Invoice is based on the CodeIgniter PHP framework which I am familiar with and the installation is very simple. It comes with some reports but one can add extra specific reports if needed.

Simple invoices has the biggest download of the four at 11M and it took a while to install and get going. It comes with dev, staging and production environments plus sample data all set up which is good and all one has to do is set the environments appropriately.

Siwapp is based on the Symfony PHP framework and this also is a simple and straightforward invoicing application but one has to follow the specific instructions for installation.

jBilling is probably the most complete system of all the four that I had a quick look at. Its Java based and it is professional suppported 24/7.

I think jBilling would suit somebody needing more functionality and doing a lot of invoicing because it was designed to handled complex recurring billing scenarios.

I am sure there are other open source invoicing systems that I did not come across but I must say I was pleased to see these are quite good and for now I will settling for Bamboo invoice.