{"id":84,"date":"2007-04-24T08:21:00","date_gmt":"2007-04-24T08:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/10.168.29.5\/blog\/?p=84"},"modified":"2010-12-01T01:16:21","modified_gmt":"2010-12-01T09:16:21","slug":"free-open-source-billing-with-phpbms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/2007\/04\/free-open-source-billing-with-phpbms\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Open Source Billing with phpBMS"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m in the market for some important software. I’ve been using Access to track my hours and to generate invoices but it’s time for something more established and supported than my one-off app.<\/p>\n

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 and wouldn’t it be cool if I could automate my billing with a cron job?<\/p>\n

I looked at Compiere and SugarCRM but these are overkill. They are great at what they do but just have too much bureaucratic overhead for my small business. No matter what I go with, I want a free software package because it’s important to me that I be able to modify, examine and extend the billing software I use.<\/p>\n

Following a search on SourceForge for “php billing software”, I found a few online demos and installed others on my 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.<\/p>\n

That was phpBMS. It’s free, it’s based on my favorite duo of php and mysql, and it’s AJAXy. 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 and here’s a video of some of that.<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I think phpBMS is a great platform for a business who doesn’t want to get bogged down in 7 layers of management. It’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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

Edit: After a few years of limping along with my own solution, I am now happily using phpBMS. I’ve created a module called Time Entry<\/a> to allow me to build invoices from my job entries and I’ve begun to work on the entire codebase over at github<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m in the market for some important software. I’ve been using Access to track my hours and to generate invoices but it’s time for something more established and supported than my one-off 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-default"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":384,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions\/384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}