Free Open Source Billing with phpBMS

I'm in the market for some important software. I've been using Access to keep track of my jobs and hours but something's missing. I'm not able to access it unless I'm at my computer and frankly it's time for something more established and supported than my own little app.

What I'm looking for is a combination of Customer Relationship Management(CRM) and Enterprise (cough) Resource Planning(ERP) for a small business. In English, I want a billing system with a contacts database. Wouldn't it be cool if I could automate my billing with a cron job?

I looked at Compiere (even downloading a virtual appliance) and SugarCRM but these are overkill. They are great at what they do but just have too much bureaucratic overhead for a small business. No matter what I go with, I want free software because it's the right thing to do when you're searching for some important new hotness.

Following a search on SourceForge for "php billing software", I found and tried a few options either with their online demos or actually installing them on my own server. I installed eBills, I looked at cwispy, I tried jBilling. Each of them had strong points and weak points but they weren't for me. My search ended when I found something functional with a little web 2.0 charm.

That was phpBMS. It's free, it's based on my favorite duo of php and mysql, and it's got some AJAX-y goodness. To try it out, I entered in some clients and prospects(the CRM side) and created a couple of product categories and products(the ERP side). Then I made an order, converted it into an invoice and printed a PDF from it. This pretty much covered my business lifecycle.

I do have a dream. I dream of invoices that magically get sent out without my intervention. I dream of entering my jobs daily and the software taking care of all the rest. phpBMS was built with modularity in mind so I'm working on a module to fulfill my dream.

Returning to phpBMS out-of-the-box, all I found lacking was something for recurring invoices and a way for me to record my jobs like I did in my own database. These are small issues when you consider that most of what I found that did recurring invoices was made exclusively for the web hosting business and my way of recording jobs is, well, my own special concoction.

I think phpBMS is a great platform for a business who doesn't want to get bogged down in 7 layers of management. jit's a web-enabled business management application that's sized right for companies of 1-20 people. You can try it out at http://www.phpbms.org. I'm going to try it for a few months and report my results then. If you've got any comments on phpBMS or another app I should take a look at, let 'em fly.