My name is Thomas Hunter. I’m the sole developer of NeoInvoice. I started this project back in 2010 under the name of my LLC, Renowned Media. I had some big plans, it was going to be an all-purpose business application handling all the needs of the typical service company, especially software developers. But, it is quite the saturated market, believe you me. There is a ton of competition and this project requires daily care and continuous updates.

While lacking confidence that I would be able to give NeoInvoice the attention it deserves, I never accepted payments for NeoInvoice accounts (although a payment system is in place, hidden, but functioning properly). It currently costs me $30 a month for a VPS to host this project, and so this project has cost me nearly $1,000 in hosting since it’s inception. Don’t get me wrong, the project has lead to some personal success, e.g. helping me acquire my current day-job and undoubtedly helping me get into the Y Combinator W11 program.

The future of the project is a little uncertain. I can’t keep it going how it is, I haven’t updated the site in three months, and it is costing me money. I could open source the website for the world to have access to, but I would need to shut the site down as there are undoubtedly security flaws which would be exposed. I could also sell the website and let a new owner take over, which would either mean they keep the site running or transfer users to their (similar) project.

The project itself is rather substantial; it contains over 10,000 lines of code written by me (including PHP, JS, CSS, HTML). I’ve put hundreds of hours of time into the project. It was (prematurely) optimized and can handle the stress of hundreds, possibly thousands, of concurrent users, by making use of various caching technologies. The app has been re-designed twice, and currently boasts an attractive, AJAX SPA (Single Page Application) interface.

If you are interested in purchasing NeoInvoice, or are from some sort of Open-Source advocacy group, please send me an email at tlhunter AT gmail  DOT com. If I don’t get any offers, or too low of offers, I will open source the project. The app won’t necessarily be sold to the highest bidder, I want to make sure NeoInvoice doesn’t fall into “evil hands”. Users who want their data backed up contact me as well, I will provide an export of your data in a commonly used spreadsheet format. If any users do not want their accounts transferred to a new owner, I will delete all of the relevant data from the system.

For now, you will need to manually visit the secure version of the site. We didn’t want to automatically redirect people until we buy a regular certificate as the browser popup will likely scare some people off.

Installation of an OS X Dashboard Widget couldn’t be easier. You’ll want to download the zip file of the widget from the Widget Page. Once downloaded, double click the file and it will be de-compressed and you will see the widget icon appear. Double click this icon and Finder will ask you if you would like to install the widget. Tell it yes and your dashboard will appear. At this point the dashboard should have automatically added the widget, if not, you can click the plus symbol in the lower left corner, find the NeoInvoice widget icon, and drag it into your dashboard area.

Congratulations, you’ve installed the NeoInvoice Time Tracking Widget! Feel free to drag and drop it around in your Dashboard.

Account Sign-In Help:

Assuming you’ve got the dashboard widget installed and have created an account, you’ll want to follow the next simple steps to sign into your account:

1. Click the gear icon in the lower right corner of the widget to open the config screen
2. Click in the username field and type your username
3. Click in the password field and type your password
4. Click the login button to the right of the password field

At this point you will get a message either saying you were successfully logged in and that your projects and worktypes were downloaded, or that there was an error logging in.
If you have successfully logged in you can continue to the Configuration Help section. If you have forgotten your password, you can visit the password reset page.

Configuration Help:

While on the Configuration screen (clicked the little gear in the lower right corner), you are able to set three different settings for your widget. All of these settings are optional.The first setting is the granularity of your time tracking. You are able to set this to 5 minutes, 15 minutes (default), 30 minutes, and 60 minutes (1 hour). NeoInvoice will automatically round the time up your specified amount, depending on how accurate your company prefer’s to be.

You can also set the default worktype and default project you work with. These values will automatically be selected on the main screen when loading the NeoInvoice widget from now on.

Recording Time Help:

If you are still on the Configuration screen, you can click the gear in the lower right corner to go back to the main screen.

On this screen, you have three dropdowns, a text box, and a button. The Project and Worktype dropdowns will remain empty until you login. The Ticket dropdown will remain empty until you select a project (and will only populate if the project has tickets).

Select a project and the type of work you are about to perform. If you are working on a particular ticket, you can select that as well. Type a description of the type of work you’ll be performing in the text box on the right. Click Start Working when you are ready.A box will appear on the bottom of the window, showing the total time, and the time rounded to the minutes you specified on the Configuration screen. The Start Working button has now changed into a Done Working button. At this point, close the dashboard (either pressing the
dasbhoard/F4 button again or clicking an empty area in the dashboard) and begin working!

When you are done, you can open the dashboard again, and click the Done Working button. This will save the work you have performed and send it off to the NeoInvoice website. At this point the dashboard widget is available for working on other projects.

Signup for an account and take advantage of these new features before this awesome deal goes away! (No squatting please!)

Current limitations are that the image needs to be a jpg and that the file size should be less than half a megabyte (we will add png and gif support soon and possibly vector formats if there is enough demand). If your logo doesn’t meet this criteria you may want to consider shrinking it down a little (keep in mind that if your invoice PDF’s get too big, they will email slower and may annoy your clients.) Your image will be automagically stretched to fit into the PDF document, and will keep it’s high-resolution appearance.

Please enjoy the new feature and leave us any comments.

The side panels are used for displaying your data in an easy-to-navigate hierarchical format. You can view your clients, projects, invoices (overdue and upcoming), users (sorted into groups, inactive users are dimmed), and tickets (sorted by ownership). Previously all of these items had the same icon; a blank sheet of paper. Sure, this was a generic way to represent a node of data, but these items already had icons used in different parts of the application. Now, the data items share their expected image formats.

Another update is that we’ve colorized the Tickets, so that far-future deadline tickets are monochrome, tickets due in the next week are orange, and tickets that are due today or overdue are red. We’re considering making the color schemes and date ranges configurable by the company.

Also, we are working on the ability for companies to upload their company logo’s. These logo’s would be visible on invoice PDF’s and optionally emails (although this requires the client to enable image downloads for security purposes). Branded invoices add that additional professional touch (currently company names are displayed as text).

If you have any issues with the new system, please use the contact form and give us a shout!

We also took care of a few minor bugs. E.G., ticket categories and stages were only partially optional since the last update, but now they are fully optional (as intended). We also found that IE was caching some pages which shouldn’t be cached (meaning you would see old information even though you had made updates to the data). We went ahead and fixed that bug too.

Finally, more of the panel content has been updated, so that small inconsistencies between panel appearances have been removed. The entire interface should feel even more like one solid application.

Even though we’ve had a surplus of accounts created over the past few days, the NeoInvoice server is still purring like a kitten. We would like to thank our new member for giving NeoInvoice a try!

Previously, the usage of Ticket Categories and Ticket Stages were required when creating Tickets. These let you track the status of tickets and design different workflows for the different kinds of work your company performs. But, sometimes you don’t want to set all this information. The casual Ticket creator can now leave the fields blank, and when they want to mark a ticket as being complete, simply delete it.

However, the Stage/Category way is encouraged, as you can set tickets as being completed and leave them in the archives and always go back to see details.