Is this a dumb idea?
Hi all
TL;DR
Im working on a tool that allows you to generate invoices in the invoicing app of your choice (currently only Wave invoicing) by drawing data from a variety of sources (currently only Toggl timesheets) and would like some thoughts on whether people think it could be useful or not.
Demo at ttgp.sellomkantjwa.com.
username: [email protected]
password: 123456
Note: This is unusable on mobile
I'm working on a little tool that allows you to generate an invoice from a variety sources. Idea came to me when I was contacting and billing several clients at the same time, it just seemed to take longer than it should. When it came time to invoice, my workflow was basically this:
- Go into Toggl and generate a report for the client to invoice
- Take the hours/minutes and convert to a decimal, which is what's required in Wave.
- Create an invoice item for the hours
- Calculate and add any discounts (This is almost always a thing)
- Export Toggl report and Wave invoice to PDF
- Send email in gmail. Attach timesheets and invoice
- Save the wave/toggl reports in Google Drive
- Repeat for all clients
Time To Get Paid (or ttgp for short) basically glues all steps that happen inside Toggl and Wave, (thats's step 1-5 above) and puts them in one app. The idea is not only to support Toggl and Wave but to connect other sources to other invoicing apps, e.g invoiceNinja or Xero. The source can also be anything that resolves to some kind of quantity that can be used as an input into the invoice line item. I'm at a point where Im questioning the validity of the idea so I thought I'd just take a second to get some thoughts on whether I'm building a product only I would ever use.
- Is this so niche that only one person (myself) would find use for it. i.e is this a weird workflow?
- If it does have a valid use case, does this even make sense as an app? Or am I essentially just building an x (e.g hours) -> decimal converter?
To better give an idea of how this would work, I have prepped a pre-mvp demo that people can around with. It's very bare bones but carries the main idea of what I am trying to build out.
Available at ttgp.sellomkantjwa.com
username: [email protected]
password: 123456
I personally wouldn't use this but I can see the value in having a tool like this for agencies/consulting businesses where you have many staff working on multiple projects/clients. The sales pitch would be something like "How much are you losing by incorrectly billing your clients?"
@richdevelops yea that's one of the main clients I'm looking at. Thanks for the feedback, really appreciated.
First, there are no dumb ideas. The Pet Rock generated $15 million dollars in sales.
As someone who did freelance work and ran a marketing agency for a number of years, I can see the need for this solution. I actually have never heard of Wave until this post, but it looks like a startup that is looking to compete with Quickbooks Online. Which I'm sure is a consideration, but would be willing to guess their API is much more convoluted.
So the idea seems worth validating, but the process seems to only be useful for summarizing all hours into a single line item. I couldn't see any way to create an invoice that shows details of the work performed. So for me, it would be adding another tool into generating an invoice that I would still need to customize. Meaning, Toggl provides you with separate line item results, and accounting tools allow you to create line items for what was offered.
Which in my experience, clients really appreciated seeing details of smaller amounts to know exactly how their money was spent. For clients that didn't care about the small details, they preferred to work on a retainer agreement. So perhaps this is a good tool for that scenario.
Hope this feedback helps.
Hi @youmustbecrazy, thanks for the very thoughtful response. Good to have people that have done some freelancing give feedback.
You're right. The demo only allows one line but splitting that out by projects and by user is the pipeline.
Wow! Til Per Rock