The Evolution of an Invoicing Creature
TL;DR ✨
Trained monkeys who keep clicking through the same steps for twenty years, and enlightened monkeys who have written a script to do it during those twenty years.
Invoicing modules are a nightmare and a long-term undertaking. Not because invoicing is particularly complicated, but because every business has its own specifics, and finding a universal model capable of covering every need can sometimes be painful.
The world of invoicing is divided into two groups of people.
Trained monkeys who keep clicking through the same steps for twenty years, and enlightened monkeys who have written a script to do it during those twenty years.
Invoicing modules are a nightmare and a long-term undertaking. Not because invoicing is particularly complicated, but because every business has its own specifics, and finding a universal model capable of covering every need can sometimes be painful.
This article looks at invoicing habits ranging from the uninformed creature through the freelancer and serious entrepreneur to the professional IT person.
1. The uninformed creature¶
Everyone starts by opening Excel or Calc, downloading a template, clicking together something that vaguely resembles a payment document according to instructions found on Google, and sending it by email. Such beginner templates can be downloaded here. Anyone just starting with invoicing should give it a try; at least it will help them remember what an invoice looks like :-)
2. Freelancer¶
Over time, repeatedly clicking through the same steps becomes annoying, so templates are created. An occasional robot may also be needed to check whether an invoice has been paid.
The author found three interesting applications on the market that are:
- Cheap
- Functional
- Simple
- Accessible from anywhere
They are:¶
From the author's point of view, iDoklad is the best. It is simple, clear, completely free, can check payments, and has everything needed for day-to-day use. Its only truly painful disadvantage is that when an email is sent automatically from iDoklad, Cígler Software places a conspicuous advertisement in the email footer. The author considers this completely unusable because it may put his customers off or appear untrustworthy.
The clear choice is therefore Fakturoid, which is free for up to four contacts but, for approximately CZK 194 per month, becomes an excellent everyday tool for freelancers keeping single-entry accounts.
Readers can explore the Superfaktura.sk app as homework.
3. Serious entrepreneur¶
The author, his friend, and his colleagues agreed that if they were building a business again from scratch, one of their first assumptions would be to construct the entire ecosystem with the expectation that one day it would move to double-entry bookkeeping and a limited company. If turnover exceeds one million per year and the accountant begins to be used a little more heavily, life will have to be complicated by double-entry bookkeeping anyway. The sooner this assumption is adopted, the more suffering can be avoided in the future.
Cooperation with an accountant is generally unavoidable, and this is where two worlds of habits collide. One world clicks; the other scripts; their intersection is imaginary. It is time to start using something more sophisticated than tools such as Fakturoid.
POHODA is the most widespread system in companies. It has a good base of trained business-school graduates, excellent support, a GUI resembling the Windows world, and generally everything needed for day-to-day use. An ordinary user should certainly choose POHODA and not worry about it. But after learning a few keyboard shortcuts, that user should be prepared to spend the next twenty years clicking through the same steps like a properly trained monkey. Good luck. For an employee, there is nothing to resolve: someone else pays for the time. And if the company has an IT person, the author would not want to be in that person's shoes when POHODA's DOS-style structure starts being bent to meet the company's needs. Ouch.
What truly won the author's heart on the Czech market was ABRA FlexiBee. He fell in love with its unfair advantage over the other software on the market:
- It is entirely cloud-based (a real cloud, not a pretend one)
- Its REST API is unique
- It is cross-platform
- It is Linux <3
- The basic version is free
The problem is that when an ordinary person sees the list above, the author does not expect those buzzwords to mean anything to them.
Not every cloud is really a cloud. To an ordinary user, a pretend cloud can be anything outside their PC, whether a remote desktop or five naughty photos stored on some hard drive in the United States. ABRA is entirely cloud-based. Making it genuinely run separately on a server takes a considerable amount of coding. Several years of work behind the scenes are not apparent at first glance. The result? Accounting data is available everywhere: on a phone, a tablet, a local machine, and through a web interface. It does not matter whether the operating system is Linux, Mac, or Windows. The accounting system is no longer tied to a single place.
When the author first saw the REST API documentation, his reaction was as follows:
The author had never seen anything better and considers it the best discovery of the previous year. The REST API is used to connect ABRA to anything in the business world. See the clear documentation for yourself.
This is not merely about configuring incoming invoices to be converted from ISDOC/XML into FlexiBee XML, imported automatically, and checked automatically against incoming payments from Fio banka. Nor is it merely about setting up automatic reminders. It is a completely unique way to automate dozens of tasks, save hours of typing at a computer, and spare the eyes hours of staring at a screen. ABRA is the first path away from the drudgery of invoicing and toward a world of freedom, where several thousand invoices per month can be checked and issued automatically without a hitch, and remain accessible at any time.
The author does not reserve all the praise for ABRA. There are dozens of accounting software packages. Other examples include Money S3, Oberon, Ekonom, Omega Kros, Účto, and Symplex.
4. Professional IT¶
The older the author gets, the more he comes to one realization: the better people can administer their own systems, the better they sleep. All those clouds are excellent, but having the system on one's own server is a safer bet, because if anything goes wrong, it is easier to sleep soundly and keep matters under control. In one sentence: when managers say, "Outsource everything," fire them. Outsource everything that is tedious, but keep tight control over every little thing. It will make for better sleep :-)
And when a reader one day becomes a millionaire who owns several hundred companies, it will probably be best to write something from scratch for that unique ecosystem and employ a few people to look after it. But that will probably take a few days, won't it? Perhaps ABRA will help accelerate the growth toward that stage.