InvoiceRate

The problem

Independents and small teams do their billing on the move — between jobs, on site, or after hours. The tools they inherit were built for accountants: dense desktop dashboards, a wall of fields, and settings that assume you already know tax rules. The result is late invoices, forgotten payments, and no clear answer to the one question that matters: “How much money is actually coming in?”

Small business owners rarely want an accounting platform. They want to send a clean invoice in under a minute, mark it paid when the money lands, and see their month at a glance.

What I designed and built

1. Dashboard: A single “Today” surface that leads with what needs attention — sales and purchase counts, anything needing review, and quick actions to raise a sales or purchase invoice. Below it, “Money this month” shows collected revenue and outstanding balances so the health of the business reads in one glance.
2. Invoices: Create, preview and send professional invoice PDFs with saved business and client details, line items, tax/VAT fields, notes and payment terms. Every invoice carries a clear status — paid, pending, overdue or draft — so nothing quietly slips.
3. Payments and analytics: Record payments as they arrive and watch a money summary update across week, month, year, all or a custom range. Totals can be counted by paid date or invoice date, and VAT is handled as sales VAT minus deductible purchase VAT.
4. Clients: Save clients once and reuse them across invoices, so repeat billing is a couple of taps.
5. Reports: One-tap monthly business reports summarise sales, business costs, VAT and anything unreviewed, then export to CSV or PDF for an accountant or your own records.
6. Settings: Sensible defaults that respect local rules — default and reporting currency with live exchange conversion for dashboard totals, a default tax/VAT rate, selectable invoice templates (Modern, Classic, Minimal, Professional), and Polish e-invoicing (KSeF) for business profiles that need it.

Design decisions

1. Calm, light, and legible: A white, uncluttered interface with a single green accent and soft status colours (green paid, amber pending, red overdue). Money is the hero on every screen; chrome stays quiet.
2. One-minute invoices: The create flow is ordered the way people actually bill — who, what, how much, when — with saved defaults doing the repetitive work so a first invoice takes about a minute.
3. Status over spreadsheets: Instead of asking users to reconcile rows, the app answers “paid, pending or overdue?” up front, and rolls those answers into the monthly view.
4. Offline-first: Invoices and payments can be captured without a connection and sync when the device is back online — billing does not wait for signal.

Outcome

InvoiceRate is live on both iOS and Android as a working v1 — designed, built and shipped end-to-end. It turns billing from a desktop chore into a pocket-sized routine: send an invoice between jobs, log a payment when it lands, and read the month at a glance.