Pancake v2.0 - Invoice Clients in style

Pancake Payments is a super awesome invoicing application that lives on your server and can be made to keep with your brands look and best of all there are no monthly fees! This application is built on CodeIgniter so it is modular, themeable and really easy to extend if you feel the need. Even better it has been brought to you by some of the people behind PyroCMS and other CodeIgniter projects like CloudIgniter!

Version 1 was pretty damn awesome and worked very well but it had a few flaws. The development took a few real hits with people coming and going and v2.0 looked like it would never come. With a few weeks of grunt work from myself and the team we've finally got it out and we've included pretty much everything people wanted.

Almost a week later we had v2.0.1 ready to go with some great feedback from customers. So, let's have a look at what it can do!

Recurring invoices

Now you can offload all that tedious recurring billing to Pancake and have it do all the work. Need to send a monthly hosting invoice? Let Pancake do it, set it to send at the interval you want and it will send the invoices at that time! The frequency can be set to a month, a week or a year and will work with either a simple cron job or you can get a third-party service to call a simple URL every day/hour.

Project Management

We kept it simple, you should be working on the task at hand, not spending 10 minutes entering it into your project management app! Now you can track projects, assign tasks to them with hourly rate, log the time you spent and when you are all done, click a button and Pancake will create an invoice with those tasks (and hourly rates) as line items! Seriously simple project management, time tracking and invoicing!

Offer Files on Payment

Ever been complained at because the client paid you out of office hours and you didn't notice because you were at the pub? Or ever heard this?

Client: We'll fill out the payment form soon, but we need the files right now!

Never worry about it again. You can add downloadable files to the invoice so as soon as clients send in your money they can access the design/code/whatever.

Summary

If you like working with PyroCMS you will love this code as most of the codebase is the same. There's plenty more Pancake can do and it will only improve in the future, but you guys should really have a look around the site and if you like it - buy a copy.