Why Invoice Ninja? Did I miss something?
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Hey,
I just played around with Invoice Ninja. It seems quite complex, but manageable. I do some freelance work every now and then, I send around 10-20 invoices/year to clients. So I thought: why not use a professional tool for that?
But here it comes: As far as I found out, I still need a payment gateway such as stripe.com to get online payments working. So invoice ninja does the same thing as stripe, where I need an account in the first place. Why should I use Invoice Ninja?
Is it only because I can get around the stripe branding by using only its API?
Or should I do my homework better and really should get to know both of these tools?Maybe someone around here can point me at the spot I'm missing.
best
David -
Your question made me go and look at Invoice Ninja again and to discover that they now do bank integration. Nice. I may investigate using them instead of FreeAgent which is what I currently use for my online accounting stuff.
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I use it, but have not bothered with online credit card payment. I had a quick look at paypal, but don't remember how far I got with it, and have had no customer demand for it.
For my use (sending invoices quickly and simply) its perfect. I use a seperate accounting package for tax stuff. -
In my previous life, I had a services company with clients like nokia/intel/second life. We used InvoiceNinja like software primarily to manage customers, send quotes, invoices etc to them. Customers pad us using channels which we had written down in the initial SoW , usually via a bank transfer. I don't think our customers would have used stripe to send us money. In fact, most of them had their own invoice automation stuff going on. In one (insane) company, if you send an invoice to an email with a "magic code", money just got transferred just like that (I know insane!).
cc @luckow who probably has more examples.
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@girish said in Why Invoice Ninja? Did I miss something?:
In one (insane) company, if you send an invoice to an email with a "magic code", money just got transferred just like that (I know insane!).
That sounds awful, please tell me the company, mail address and the magic code, so I can avoid that
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For me it's branding, quotes, data control, and more customizable features in general. Also, having web, mobile, and desktop apps are a huge plus. Today, I'm using Stripe. Tomorrow, I might use something else. I don't want to go through the hassle of importing clients, recreating products/services, etc. I pay $30 a year for IN white label and I have full control over my branding. The app is reliable, development is rapid, and support (github repo and on their forums) is responsive. No complaints.
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@David-0 said in Why Invoice Ninja? Did I miss something?:
It seems quite complex
If you compare IN with tools like EspoCRM or Dolibarr (both available here in the app catalogue), it's a handy little app.I have never used Stripe professionally. My typical customer wants to pay by invoice, payment term and bank transfer. This is where an app like Invoice Ninja wins out over a "toolchain" with Excel and Word. The moment you have more complex workflows, such as stocktaking in different warehouses, you leave IN and go to tools like Odoo.
A nice part of IN is the customer portal. You send a quote and your customer can take a look at YOUR domain in the IN portal. She can see the historical quotes and invoices. Forget the toys with signature & co, but it is possible.
To be fair: If you (or your customer) are happy with the current workflow and you don't need a centralised dashboard for all your customers and their payments, go with Stripe and be happy. Don't waste time with apps you don't need because everything works fine. If you have too much free time, promote open source software or help preserve the environment.
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@luckow said in Why Invoice Ninja? Did I miss something?:
If you (or your customer) are happy with the current workflow and you don't need a centralised dashboard for all your customers and their payments, go with Stripe and be happy
I'd like to point out that the hosted (not to be confused with the self-hosted IN on Cloudron) IN is free for 10 (or 20?) clients. You could get up and running in no time with zero maintenance required.
