I did it. I finally did it! I found the online invoicing software I have been looking for for my small business. I have been bumping around and ratcheting around the Internet looking for it and I found what I was looking for. I am not sure whether it will be the solution to your specific needs, but chances are if you have been bouncing around like me looking for a online invoicing application that you can host on your own server in order for you to use anywhere in the world, then I have something for you to consider. It is called BambooInvoice and it is a fantastically simple yet powerful solution. I have been looking at SimpleInvoice but it seems to be stuck to PHP4 and my service provider has moved to PHP5 support, bringing me to BambooInvoice. I can only blog about what I know and from what I have seen in SimpleInvoice it is definitely something to consider especially if you want to keep track of product listings and so forth.

That would have been nice in BambooInvoice too, but it is so simple to add items on the fly that it won’t be too sorely missed and my product pricing rises and falls with the Dollar anyway, updating prices on set product listings would be futile. You can add customers with multiple contacts per customer. It helps if your customer is a business with various representatives responsible for paying the invoice you send to them. The most useful feature is keeping track of paid and unpaid invoices as well as the super handy feature of printing hard copies or emailing your invoices to customers. It just makes invoices simple which is very handy. You can back up all your information but what I do is I bounce every invoice I email to my gmail account for reference purposes and backup.

It looks professional with custom logo capability and much more. It is a 10th the size of SimpleInvoice and works like a charm out of the box. Now I can send my invoices wherever I am with an Internet connection instead of being tied down to a commercial invoicing application on one computer in a corner some place. The script is OpenSource and is coordinated by Derek Allard who has come up with a genius piece of really 100% online software to make your business administration really simple. If you have a small business, this might be the tool you have been looking for in order to avoid expensive proprietary desktop software. And you gain geographic independence on top of it all.

It requires PHP5 and MySQL to run. Other configurations are possible but please reference the website for more.

Visit www.bambooinvoice.org for more info.