Brookie: a Django invoice and quote application

14 Sep 2009
6 comments

We're currently in the early start-up phase of our company. This is accompanied by finding out how to do things efficiently. The problems we found with invoices and quotes was that we needed a general look and content and, more importantly, an overview of the quotes and invoices and their status.

Well, since our specialty is creating Django applications, we decided to build brookie. Brookie is a 2-day sprint Django-admin application that takes care of Quotes and Invoices for you. You just input them in the Django-admin, and Brookie will create PDF's for you to send to your clients.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Before we explain what it does, let us show you. The following PDF's are automatically generated.

Invoice PDF // Quote PDF

Features

We have build the application on the basic feature list we wanted. Main target was simplicity, avoid letting it become bloatware. So don't expect a full featured CRM with invoice application, do expect a simple application handy for startups like us.

Overview of all clients

After the first contact with your client, you insert him into your database of clients. All the contact information for your clients can be found here. This is still a very basic way of managing contacts, but it can be easily extended. At the moment we still don't need any advanced stuff (CRM), but the possibility is there.

Easy Quoting

While most part of the quote is usually the same, some parts like the product description can change. In our application you can pre define all the parts that you want in the quote. When creating a new quote all you have to do is select the client and the parts in the quote. Next up fill in the items your quoting for and generate the quote as an PDF. The look of the Quote can be modified by changing the templates in the template folder.

Invoice management

Invoicing is as simple as quoting for a client. Fill in the invoice items and the application can generate a PDF. It can also be used for simple time-tracking. If you have worked on a project, you input your time and save it. Brookie will also automatically calculate the amount per item. Supply the amount of minutes, your hourly rate and Brookie tells you the amount. When the project is complete, you generate the PDF and send it of to your client.

In the overview of the invoices you can order and search the invoices. You can also see how many days until the invoice is overdue.

Our 2 cents back

We decided to release the application under a BSD-license. It's available at github. You can install it with python setup.py install or just symlink it in your pythonpath. If your using it, loving it, hating it, please let us know. We're really interested how our first, though very basic, open sourced software is used by others.

Tags: Apps, Coding