New Integrated Invoicing and Accounting System

New integrated invoicing and accounting system









Hi Group,

This post has been a long time in the making.

I'm asking for a review of my new Invoicing and Accounting System called MSPBE which stands for Managed Service Provider Back End.

To give you a little background, I am in the IT consulting business. I sell consulting services along with hardware and software. I suppose I could be classified as a Systems Integrator. In addition, I also sell web-hosting, email, and a few other items that are normally pre-billed on a recurring basis vs. post billed.

Maybe this story will sound familiar. I've been using WHMCS to handle my recurring billing needs, todo list, as well as an addon product to track customer billable hours. But I have no use for the shopping cart, limited use of the ticketing system, and no use for the cpanel server integration. Further, I don't really have a use for a customer front end at all.

In addition, I use quickbooks for one time invoices, paying bills, managing bank accounts, and general accounting.

I hate the fact that the two systems are separate systems. Updating customer information in 2 systems, double entry of financial data, two different invoice numbers depending on whether the invoice is recurring (prebilled) and generated on whmcs or one time (postbilled) and generated with quickbooks.

Another thing I don't like is products available today are mostly subscription models. I like to own my software outright and this product will be sold and marketed that way.

Here are a few more benefits of MSPBE.

• Powerful reporting (in progress)
• Task manager to track your companies to do list or customer CRM
• Project manager and time tracking for billable hours (in progress)
• Ability to charge different sales taxes per line item on the invoice (whmcs is severely lacking here)
- Ability to have different "number of days before due" invoice dates per invoice or customer (whmcs is lacking here also)
• Simple and straight forward documentation (in progress)
• Web based, access anywhere or just internally (you own it)
• You own the product outright on your servers
• No monthly fees
• No uneasy feeling about outsourcing your most important back end system
• Personal support options
• Forum based support
• Fraction of the cost of traditional separate systems

Who it is for
• Small to medium size companies not needing multiple access levels
o IT managed services, web developers, lawyers, landscapers, consultants and more
• Companies who need something better than separate invoicing and accounting software but not large enough for a full blown ERP system

I'm looking for the following feedback.

• Do I have a product
• Any discovered bugs
• Product sales direction ideas
• Name (keep mspbe?)
• Sales pricing
• Other

If you are interested in giving this product a look, please PM me and I'll send you over the link and auth. You can feel free to play around in there, add and remove things etc..

Thank you in advance for your constructive feedback. I would estimate this project to be about 2/3 complete before a full blown beta release.

Tom

 

Here is a quick video...

 

I'm not familiar with either of those products. One thing I can say is that you would own the software, it is not a monthly service.

I believe the program is generic enough for wide industry use, including landlords.

There is no bank account integrations in this version.

 

I'll pm you the login.

No API for version 1. Right now I'm concentrating on getting this out of development and into a free beta. Also, as you can see, the appearance is a little raw, but not overly ugly. I've been concentrating on functionality and creating a bug free product. It will be "prettied up" after it goes to version 1.

You have to draw the line on changes at some point or it will never be finished.

 

Good catch on the typo.

That's not a bad idea, maybe I will just move the email invoice right to the invoice creation itself.

I'll save your third bullet for when the system is prettied up a bit.

I editted an invoice to be overdue. If you look on the summary screen, you can see an overdue invoice. To get to it, you can go to the customer menu and choose the Unpaid Invoices, you will see an asterisk there too indicating it is overdue.

Before you can deposit a payment on an invoice, you must first receive the payment (also in Unpaid Invoices), its a two step process. It works just like quickbooks, you might receive multiple deposits all week that you need to record, but you only go to the bank once per week.

 

Here is an updated video with the customer time tracking feature published.