Moving over from Freshbooks

Self-Hosted | v4/Legacy
1

Hi,

I’ve been checking out Invoice Ninja lately and it’s looking good. And I was wondering if there is another way to import data from Freshbooks.

It seems that FB only exports some data from invoices - line items for instance are nowhere to be found. I would hate to see all my hand-typed data gone.

2

We support importing data from FreshBooks on /settings/import_export however we’re limited by the data they provide. I don’t believe they include the line item details in their export.

3

Hi,
Thanks for the time for heading me out to help me and others in a similar bind. Really trying to import line items in invoices from FreshBook with the possibility of adding time into the InvoiceNinja tasks (since the line items include that information).

Using the Freshbook import utility did not include invoice line items or tasks even though Freshbook has a table with all invoice line items. More of that is all the very bottom.

So to retrieve the column header names InvoiceNinja uses, I did an Export Data in InvoiceNinja, Selected, CSV, and marked “All” After a day all freshbook data was in the a 11 tabbed InvoiceNinja CSV. However, there is no import option to take the exported InvoiceNinja CSV data to do an import. It only allowed uploading individual CSVs Clients, Invoices, Products, Expenses and that method did not work out.

I have all data inserted as csv matching the InvoiceNinja CSV field names. What other options are available?

I was considering using zapier.com in hopes that it would transfer existing invoices. And if it doesn’t I was going to setup another freshbooks account and import all data from my existing and have it tied to zapier so it would run the action of new invoice creation and add to invoiceNinja. But I can’t figure out how to get a /api/v1 on my self-hosted install. Is it with the SDK? I uploaded the files to /InvoiceNinja/sdk-php but it doesn’t give me any option to install or configure when I access any of those php files from the browser.

One option maybe if it sounds possible :
Is there any function available within InvoiceNinja or outside of it, to allow me to generate a JSON from one CSV with 11 tabs? If not, what are maybe the fields in Json where so I can add all data from Freshbooks matching each column in Json to then do an import?

Another option if you know of one that could do this:
Export Freshbook into another system (Zoho, Hiveage, etc…) then use the InvoiceNinja to import from that platform?

I wouldn’t see how it’s not possible to export line items from Freshbook as it contains a table along with other details of line items.
I’ve exported all tables from Freshbooks and opened in Excel. They have a separate table called InvoiceLine containing fields to like InvoiceID, Name (In InvoiceNinja it is called a Task), Description (Invoice line item), Unit Cost (it includes dollar amount of anexpense, dollar amount of one set rate, or dollar amount of hourly rate), Qty, Type (Values are either Item, Time, or Expense), Client ID, InvoiceNumber, InvoiceAmount, Status (paid, sent, viewed, draft), Invoice amount, Invoice date (Created Date)

4

  • When importing a CSV file you can use any column headers you want, after you upload the file you can map the columns.

  • If you want to send sample invoice and line item files to [email protected] (we just need the columns headers and a single line of data) we can try to improve our import.

5

Thank you. I have sent the requested documents in a ZIP compression.

When importing all invoice lines using CSV, they all are considered as invoice_item_type_id=1 (A product rather than a service). I’ve changed the 509 invoice lines so the services is invoice_item_type_id= 2. But now, the services do not show up when viewing an invoice in “edit mode”. It displays in the PDF. Then I adjusted a few product_id columns for invoice lines that are services, to product_id=0, but that did not fix the problem of missing service line items in Invoice. :frowning: So strange. Any guidance would be helpful. Thank you

The CSV import was not working because for whatever reason roughly 20 of the 509 lines of invoices have some sort of line break. When this happens, the lines items below and beneath the offended line, and the Qty. Cost were empty, and notes line item was missing the full note. I’ve removed the line break in all types of ways. Imported 509 lines which creates the 90 invoices I have.
Corrected the notes, Qty, and Cost, by copying and pasting to MySQL database to overwrite the missing data from CSV Import.

6

Thanks for the files! In the past Freshbooks didn’t export the line item details, it looks like they now do. We’ll work to improve our Freshbooks import to support this.

Imported line items will always have the invoice_item_type_id set to 1, the value is only set to 2 when converting tasks to invoices.

v4.4 (releasing in about a week) will include a fix for the CSV issue with line breaks.

7

Now I’m just trying to figure out how the expense import determines the associated “invoice” its tied to because the expenses_invoiceid was null but it is linking to a different client. If I fill in invoiceID in expenses, the “view invoice” for that expenses still links to a completely different client. Could it be the order of the expenses in CSV corresponds with the order listed for the imported invoices?

With that information, you provided helped! I was able to change has_tasks from 0 to 1 in order for “services” item lines to show!
I have a spreadsheet of tasks to import but it only contains total hours rather than individual times.

All Invoicelines after import did not show as a service.
In InvoiceLines table, set Product_type_id=2 for rows with services,

  • as a result, services and expenses displayed in PDFs but the edit invoice page did not show services table.
    In invoices table, Changing column “has_taks” value from 0 to 1 now displays services & expenses table in edit mode & PDF.
    UPDATEinvoicesSEThas_tasks= ‘1’ WHEREinvoices.id= 79;

Awesome news about v4.4!

8

Imported expenses aren’t linked to invoices.

Note: we advise against running manual SQL queries to adjust the database.

9

When trying to import Freshbooks Invoices I don’t see a column for the invoice total. There is only a “Paid” not anything for “Amount”. Am I missing something?

10

The total amount is calculated from the line item amounts.

Note: make sure to use the CSV import for Freshbooks.

11

Thank you!