Hey Everyone,

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.

We are currently developing an OS X Dashboard Widget to allow NeoInvoice users the ability to quickly input time they work on projects. We expect the widget to be complete in a couple of weeks. Expect a lot of graphical updates by the time it goes live!

A big part of modern businesses, corporate businesses, and any sort of open source application development business workflow, is issue/ticket management. A ticket represents some work that needs to be done, perhaps a new feature needs to be made, a bug needs to be updated, or the steps for planning on how to make the conference room bigger needs to happen. Tickets can be assigned to users and users will remain on-track, with a list of items ahead of them to be completed. Tickets represent a great/modern way to assign tasks to employees to be completed.

Since tickets are such an important role in a companies workflow, it should be of no surprise that we will be adding in support for this to NeoInvoice! This change represents a different direction for the NeoInvoice application. Previously it represented a time tracking application, then an all out invoicing and expenses tracking application. It will soon become the number one place for all company workflow related interaction.

You will be able to keep track of ticket status, assign tickets to either users or user groups (yes, user groups are coming too, but they will be optional), schedule ticket due dates, and assign the time you work to a particular ticket. And, if you don’t like the option of using tickets you can feel free to totally ignore them and hide the panel, they are not required by the rest of the application.

Expect to see ticket support added within the next couple of weeks!

We are working on a new feature of NeoInvoice: Expenses!

What are expenses? Items which need to be billed to your client, but aren’t based on hourly service-work you have performed. For example, I’ve recently had the need to build a barcode scanning and printing system into a clients web application. But, to build the software I needed to purchase a USB barcode scanner and bill it to the client. Before adding expense tracking to NeoInvoice, one would need to add a new worktype for the product and create a time segment set for one hour, which is a really inappropriate way of doing this, or add an amendment to the invoice manually. After this coming update, you will be able to add a new expense, set the price along with the type of expense (e.g. product, hosting, etc.), and attach it to your clients’ next invoice.

Expect to see this update over the next couple of days!