I started to self-host Invoice Ninja v5 for my small business and it worked great. I ended up having issues a couple of years ago where taxes weren’t displaying correctly on invoices. Instead of investigating and resolving the issue, I started using Xero for my accounting. I wasn’t a fan of my data being hosted elsewhere, so I came back to Invoice Ninja and began migrating my data back to Invoice Ninja. It met 80% of my needs.
To track business expenses, I created a client as the business name and assigned expenses to that client, using categories named as each of my “chart of accounts” for expenses. I started importing bank transactions with CSV files and it worked except for finding a way to track transfers between bank accounts. I can only classify transaction types as income or expenses but not transfers.
I was hoping to find a way to link together a withdrawal from one account and a deposit to another account. Searching this only comes up stating this is a limitation with Invoice Ninja as it’s not accounting software. I tried setting one transaction as an expense in one account which worked, but when setting the transaction as income in another account, I can only link the transaction to an invoice. I could create an invoice for the company but that would become clunky and will probably affect total income/expense values.
A fix to this may be to add a “Transfer” option to the Type dropdown when editing a transaction to allow for a separate way of tracking where a total balance in this category should always be zero due to transfers in and out being the same value. This amount would not affect the total income/expense values. Also, allowing expenses to be internally assigned to the company would prevent creating a client for the company.
Invoice Ninja can handle 80% of the needs for a small business, so I’m trying to fill the gap of the other 20%. I thought of using Budibase, Grist or another self-hosted database software to help with this gap but I haven’t investigated time into trying this out. Tracking this on a spreadsheet could be a solution, but I don’t want to invest time in building one if one already exists.
My question is, are there any other self-hosted solutions that could sync the data from Invoice Ninja (quote approved amounts, invoiced amounts, paid amounts, etc.) and import this into its software? Even if it’s in CSV format, I can work with that. Using a hosted connector service is still the same as a hosted solution, as your data is being passed through a remote server.
TLDR = Looking to see what others are using for self-hosted accounting solutions that work with Invoice Ninja.
Thanks!