Serverless Invoice Generation

One of my non-techie friends was starting a new business and he wanted an Invoicing System. he reached out to me hoping that I can help him with a small website or app

Open Source Software to rescue

If this was me a couple of years earlier I would have started the typical Software Development Life Cycle for a new project, but this new me is lazy. So, I searched the web to find a decent open-source project that can fulfil his needs for now, I came across this project it looked very interesting to me, it was using LaTeX to generate the invoice since I had no experience in the tools I refrained to use it (although I would love to explore it). after going through a couple of interesting looking projects, I found something familiar

The Base

Serverless Invoices

Create and manage invoices in your browser. “Serverless Invoices” is a free invoicing tool for freelancers and small businesses. Made with Vue.js.

This was built using Vue.js and the result was a static website with some Javascript magic to handle the invoicing, it was also persistent data in browser storage. the codebase was clean and organized for anyone to build on top of that.

In the past I have built a website using Vue.js it was a good experience, after playing with the demo app I felt that it was only missing one major feature that can be added in a day and some layout related changes, so I decided to start with this as the base.

Missing Feature

The feature that I think was important and is missing was the ability to have custom columns in invoice and a couple of adjustments addition/removal of static sections, I created a form of the project and started tweaking the project to add the feature, I wanted to make the user specify the columns so that the layout of the invoice is also customizable.

Deployment

I made the so that by editing a config file a user can customize the columns, although I wanted to have some form of UI to do that. but since the self-defined deadlines were a little tight I decided to do that later.

The result was hosted hereinvoice.zkhan.in