More Free Invoicing Software For Small Business

With LibreOffice Calc and some Java, you can pull customer and product data into a spreadsheet invoice.

I mentioned LibreOffice in another post, but that wasn’t really invoicing “software,” just an invoice spreadsheet. I recently stumbled upon another gem that involves the same program, and actually does qualify as free invoicing software for small business. You can run it on a Windows or Linux machine, with Libre/Open Office and a Java Runtime Environment installed.

How It Began — Finding free invoicing software for small business

I had a customer, a food distribution company. When I showed up, they were trying to use Peachtree, and it wasn’t working. They wanted a salesman walking through a store creating an invoice for items he saw as he went. I couldn’t find anything at the time, that did what they needed done. I fumbled around long enough and ended up finding a fellow in Ohio that could customize some already existing software. Andrew Pitonyak had written a book about OpenOffice macros, and we hired him to write some custom stuff that would do our thing. Andy, if you’re reading this, I still have that marble ready to make you a fountain; it’s just been a rough few years…

What does this free invoicing software for small business DO?

Essentially, it lets you use a few different keystrokes in a spreadsheet to get customer and inventory data off of a couple lists into a spreadsheet invoice.

There are three sheets. One is a customer list. You get into that, hit a shortcut key (you can set whatever you want) and it throws that customer’s over to a new invoice sheet. The third sheet is inventory. You find the item you want, hit another shortcut, enter a quantity into a pop-up box, and dump that item into the invoice.

How’s It Working?

Grab it over on the OpenInvoice Sourceforge page and let me know what happens. I hadn’t set it up for a while, so I ran through the process and updated the how-to. I can give you a hand if you get stuck on something. The salesman, also son of the owner, at the food company using OpenInvoice died. They sold out not long after to a competitor that had their own software setup. I never finished the web based version I was writing to track inventory and purchase orders.

The web and MySQL backend are still kicking around somewhere. I may finish it if I think anybody is interested. Let me know if it’s something you’d want to take for a spin. It was very sad that we never implemented it.