Hello, InvoicePlane!

I recently got an E-Mail from my invoicing software provider, saying that they will be discontinuing their 5.95€ per month rate and in exchange will put me on the 9,95€ per month rate with additional features I didn’t actually need.

That was enough pressure to make my rounds on the open source market for invoicing software again.

After browsing through some rather old, rather incomplete or rather „It’s FREE and OPEN SOURCE!!! (…) unless you really want to work with it.“ software, I found InvoicePlane. InvoicePlane is basically the 0ld Open Source foundation of the commercial software „FusionInvoice“. I din’t add a link there, because FusionInvoice has closed its doors in the meantime.

So I tried the demo of their 1.5 version and immediately saw the potential there: A nice, responsive UI made with a stable framework (altough it’s PHP-based, meh). However, I had to turn it down, because it was missing an expenses-feature.

But as I saw the potential, I didn’t gave up right there. They also had an alpha version of a 2.0 branch. It seems, as if the guy behind FusionInvoice was quite an okay guy, because just before closing down on FusionInvoice, he opened the complete source code of the then-current version of FusionInvoice and the guys at InvoicePlane took the chance to adopt it for the 2.0 version.

And it had the expenses feature! And even a REST Api.

So I tried to install it on my server, but it seemed to require PHP >=7.1 and my server was running on 7.0. After some tests I finally made a dockerized solution, which works quite nice.

I tested the software and it had all the required features except for two reports I needed.

So I dived into the addons implementation of InvoicePlane, which was hard, because there was no development documentation and no example I could derive from.

After some hard work, I finally created an income/expense report and a report for the german UstVa tax form.

With all these things done, I finally could write my invoice software provider to cancel my contract.

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