In a couple years, he will probably learn that maintaining this invoice system to support the changes in his business will prove to be a frustrating waste of time.
For a reasonable fee, I now use Freshbooks. I love paying a small fee to have a company constantly improving and perfecting the invoice system I use, and the system saves me A LOT of time each month.
13 years ago, I could just put numbers in an invoice in word, send it to a customer, they paid by check. Then over the years, it got much more complicated. In-house tools, mixed with other accounting software, was just sucking time.
I know it's fun to write tools like this for business tasks, but I think you also have to pick your battles, and when you can pay for an affordable tool that will greatly simplify a business task, I choose this path.
EDIT: I recently started using Freshbooks' API to do little reporting tasks they don't provide, and this fills the "make my own tools" void when it comes to accounting.
Freshbooks is great. At a consulting company I used to work at, we used spreadsheets for time tracking. When Freshbooks came out, we immediately jumped ship and started getting tasks, tracking hours and being able to actually see when (all) projects go over budget.
For a reasonable fee, I now use Freshbooks. I love paying a small fee to have a company constantly improving and perfecting the invoice system I use, and the system saves me A LOT of time each month.
13 years ago, I could just put numbers in an invoice in word, send it to a customer, they paid by check. Then over the years, it got much more complicated. In-house tools, mixed with other accounting software, was just sucking time.
I know it's fun to write tools like this for business tasks, but I think you also have to pick your battles, and when you can pay for an affordable tool that will greatly simplify a business task, I choose this path.
EDIT: I recently started using Freshbooks' API to do little reporting tasks they don't provide, and this fills the "make my own tools" void when it comes to accounting.