I’ve been working on setting up InvoiceNinja (currently self-hosting v4.5.18 on Linux). While working through the migration of data and importing information I’ve noticed one big thing missing. Maybe I’m mistaken and you can help me find this feature.
Essentially, here in Canada, we need to calculate taxes paid on expenses for a time period (usually quarterly). In fact, it’s an important data point - seeing after a three-month period what HST was paid out in expenses.
I don’t see first - how taxes on an expense are recorded, and secondly how I might calculate those taxes paid once a period ends. For comparison - in Freshbooks, this information is gathered in the “Sales Tax Summary” report under the column “Taxes” and row “Less Expenses” - https://i.imgur.com/uUXQqar.png
Indeed, the “Line Item” tax allows me to specify taxes per line item in an invoice. Not related to my question but a useful feature.
But to clarify, what you’re saying is there’s no way in Invoice Ninja to determine taxes I paid on a group of expenses I add manually? (heck, I’ll even add a custom field if it’s possible). Is there no one else that needs this calculation? Input Tax Credits are a fundamental part of tax reporting, and in general, are aided greatly by an application calculating these numbers so we don’t have to manually go over every expense, one at a time.
Sadly, it may mean I can’t switch from Freshbooks. Lucky me, I also paid for the $30 white label option. Really kind of surprised right now.
I’ve added the issue/request to the repo. I’ll have to decide over the next little while about sticking with this tool. No plans to go back to manually going over receipts though. Why have any accounting program if they can’t do things like this right? The oldest, cheapest working version of Quickbooks I have can calculate this and even going back to that seems like the dark ages lol.
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly and responding… I appreciate it greatly. I’ve been excited about the potential I see in InvoiceNinja… so I do hope there’s a way. I’d like to help in any way I can.
I think part of the confusion may be that Invoice Ninja is an invoicing app, not an accounting app. The app uses cash basis accounting which is much simpler to track.
It’s fair, understandably few should be expecting fuller features like printing checks or envelope labels or even larger scale accounting functions like payroll. I don’t. This is more than useful for a small business (like my own) that looks for good invoicing features (like recurring billing - in fact, that’s what feature made me interested in Freshbooks) - and the ability to record expenses so I can file taxes later without a mountain of papers and an endlessly long Excel spreadsheet I updated 8 months ago.
There is - probably - a responsibility to support as many basic features when a function is supported (IE if you support invoices, there should probably be a way to add my logo - and there is of course). InvoiceNinja supports no payroll function that I can see, so extensive employee categorization, optimization, labour tracking and reporting features are not there, nor is anyone asking for them.
Always a balancing act… I too write software. Finding the right things to please everyone is crucial. If InvoiceNinja does make this happen, I’m sure I’ll fall over myself writing about it on my modestly popular blog lol.
