FreshBooks

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Build me invoicing that replaces FreshBooks — and know exactly why this is ALMOST.

Invoices and time tracking are buildable. Two things are not: **sales tax rules for the places you invoice, kept current by somebody else**, and **bank feeds with reconciliation**, which is where the accounting half actually lives. The first is a subscription to a tax service or a lot of reading. The second needs a banking data provider, and in most countries that is a contract rather than an API key.

STACK
- Node 20+ with Fastify, server-rendered HTML
- SQLite through better-sqlite3, WAL mode
- PDF from HTML with a paged-CSS renderer
- One payment provider, hosted checkout
- Caddy in front

THE DATA MODEL
- clients, contacts, projects, tasks
- entries: id, user_id, project_id, task_id, started_at, ended_at, duration_seconds, is_billable, is_locked, invoice_id, notes
- rates: id, scope, scope_id, user_id, hourly_cents, currency, effective_from — an entry bills at the rate in force when the work happened
- expenses: id, project_id, client_id, category, amount_cents, currency, incurred_on, receipt_path, is_billable, markup_percent, invoice_id, tax_cents
- estimates, invoices, credit_notes, lines, payments
- number_sequences: business_id, kind, year, last_number
- bank_transactions: id, account_id, external_id, posted_on, amount_cents, currency, description, counterparty, category_id, matched_kind, matched_id, is_reconciled
- Amounts in integer cents with a currency. Never a float

NUMBERING AND IMMUTABILITY
- Sequential with no gaps, per business, per document kind, per year, allocated inside the transaction that issues the document. In most countries this is a legal requirement rather than a preference
- A draft has no number; the number is taken at issue
- An issued invoice is never edited or deleted — a mistake is voided with a reason and corrected by a credit note referencing it
- The PDF generated once at issue and stored with its hash

TAX, HONESTLY
- Per-line rates with totals broken out by rate, which most authorities require
- Reverse charge for cross-border business customers, with the required sentence printed and both registration numbers shown
- Zero-rated and exempt stored as different things
- The rate is copied onto the line at issue; changing a rate later must never alter a document already issued
- Rates as data with an effective date, so a change is a new row rather than an edit. Maintaining them is your job now — write in the README which jurisdictions you have covered and when you last checked, and take advice

BANK FEEDS AND RECONCILIATION
- If you can get a feed, import transactions with a stable external id and match them: exact amount and date against an invoice or an expense first, then fuzzy by amount and counterparty, proposed for a human to confirm. Never auto-match on amount alone
- If you cannot, import a bank export as CSV with a mapping step and a dry run. That covers most small businesses and needs no contract
- Reconciliation state per transaction, and a report of what is unmatched — which is the report an accountant asks for

THE REST
- Timers and a weekly timesheet writing the same rows, one running timer per person enforced by a partial unique index
- Expense capture with a receipt photo, EXIF stripped, stored by hash
- A client portal at a token URL: documents, balance, and a pay button. No account, because requiring a login is how an invoice goes unpaid for a fortnight
- Reminders before and after the due date, each recorded so nobody is chased twice in a day
- Recurring invoices from a template, idempotent so the worker can run twice
- Reports: profit and loss, by client, by month, by tax rate, and an aged-debtors list — the report that gets you paid
- Export every document as PDF and every row as CSV, per period, in one command

OPERATIONS
- .env: DATABASE_PATH, STORAGE_PATH, BASE_URL, SMTP_URL, SESSION_SECRET, PROVIDER_KEY, PROVIDER_WEBHOOK_SECRET
- Migrations on boot, each once; nightly backup covering the database and the PDFs, with a tested restore
- Health endpoint

WHAT MATTERS MOST
Numbering, immutability, and the reconciliation report. Build the sequence allocation and the stored PDF first and try to break them — two invoices in the same instant, a void, a year boundary.