The flokah project (located at flokah.com) has gone through 3 stages of development.
The first was more than 10 years ago, when we first started creating invoices. The system was very simple back then, having only the ability to create clients and invoices. It was called cConsole; “Client” Console.
At that time, Simply Accounting cost about $80, and we didn’t want to spend money when we could just create our own system, with consideration to the fact that we didn’t need anything close to the number of features a full accounting system would provide.
Then, in December of 2011, we converted the simple cConsole system, which was built on our own framework (of which we tried to release as a development platform) into what we called ubudget. The ubudget name was actually taken from a friend, more like an acquaintance, that wanted to create a budgeting system. We felt they wouldn’t go through with the development, so we took it upon ourselves, or at least the name.
Unfortunately, the name never really fit the product, and ubudget -the client/project/invoicing system-, even though released at ubudget.ca, never really gained traction. This was also due to our lack of advertisement. We had a website, told a few friends, but none of our friends had huge email listings for people at Harvard…
Regardless of its’ mainstream popularity, of lack thereof, we’ve been using ubudget every single day to manage our company. And over the past 5 years we added features and changes that we needed for expansion, and to ensure we stayed organized. With ubudget you could create project tasks, documents, kanban board, track expenses, create a budget, generate income reports, track recurring services, point-of-sale, worklogs, and import csv data. All changes were promoted to ubudget.ca and accessible to everyone, for free!
All of that was well and good, but it was missing something. And it wasn’t until we decided to get rid of our custom UI, replacing it with Bootstrap about 2 months ago, that we realized just how much could be accomplished by adding in 1 small feature: a dashboard! The dashboard is where you can see a snapshot of your projects, tasks, upcoming billings, yearly income, and also provides a way to quickly create invoices in just a few clicks.
One of our earliest suggestions for ubudget was to have the ability to create invoices in bulk, and send out all the email notifications in one shot. However, as good of an idea as this is, it has not been fully implemented. But, with the addition of the dashboard, invoice creation takes less than 1/4 of the time as it used to. The addition of a mature dashboard was a huge time-saver and we are very happy that we finally managed to streamline invoicing.
So, with new functionality, a new UI, stronger security, and complete user isolation, we are proud to present flokah, ubudget’s predecessor.
We set a go-live date of June 15th, 2016…and as it turns out, it will be released on time! 🙂
