theAdmin.orgGrowing a simple software business

As much fun as it is cutting your code on a new freelance project, there is a side to the business that we freelancers tend to forget, or just hope it will go away if we ignore it. Invoicing customers. We can work as much as we want for a customer, but unless we invoice them for our work we will never get get paid. Not getting paid is bad.

Luckily, invoicing does not have to be hard. I use an open source invoicing program called Bamboo Invoice. The thing I like most about it is that it provides just what I need to invoice my customers; it does not try to provide accounting, supply chain management, or any other “total business solution”.

Installation was easy, it is written in PHP5 and uses the LAMP web stack every is familiar with. The installation instructions were pretty easy to follow. Once installed there are a few settings in the “Setting” panel that you need to customize for your business. Now you are ready to add in your customers and start to invoice them for all the time you have been “forgetting” to bill.

Once you have an invoice, the Bamboo Invoice allows you to create a PDF of the invoice and will even email your customers with the PDF attached if you want. I ran into some issues emailing the invoice to multiple people at a time so you should test it out a little bit on one of your email accounts first. The issues are probably just the way my email server is setup.

So if you are looking for a simple and open source invoicing program that you can use in your freelancing business, I would recommend Bamboo Invoice. There is an online demo that you can try at it’s homepage.

Eric Davis

As I wrote about in a prior post, I have been starting a software company. Now I have gotten it’s website to a stage where it is available to be published. Even though the website appears to be simple, it has some advanced technology behind it. Oh course it is a completely custom site using the Ruby on Rails framework. Some of it’s more buzz worthy features are:

• Separate administration panel
• Image uploads and thumbnailing
• Automatic caching
• E-Mail delivery form
• AJAX preview
• Drag and drop sorting

Check it out and tell me what you think, LittleStreamSoftware.com.

Eric Davis

I am happy to announce that my new software development company, Little Stream Software, is now open for business. It’s focus will be creating easy to use web software and websites for small businesses. I have just launched the website at www.LittleStreamSoftware.com.

If you know of any software projects or someone who might have a software project, please tell me about it by emailing me directly or by using the form on my website.

Eric Davis

If you want to make sure an exception is thrown in a Rails test just use the assert_raise assertion. For example, I am testing to make sure the SQL statement is invalid after it goes through my model’s validation

def test_exception
    c = Content.new
    # Title is missing
    assert_raise ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid do
      c.save
    end
end

This snippet is looking for the ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid exception when it calls the c.save method.

Eric Davis

Well as of last month I decided to finally create a software company and see what I can turn it into. Starting out I will be focusing on consulting but will eventually try to turn it into a product based company. I will try to post about my progress on the blog here, mostly to try to help anyone else out who is looking to start a small software company.

Related, contact me if you are in need of an honest developer with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, or Linux projects.

Eric Davis