// the find
crater-invoice-inc/crater
Open Source Invoicing Solution for Individuals & Businesses
Crater is a self-hosted invoicing and expense tracking app built on Laravel + Vue 3, with companion React Native mobile apps. It covers the core small-business billing workflow: invoices, estimates, recurring billing, payments, multi-company support, and a customer portal. Aimed at freelancers and small teams who want to own their data instead of paying Freshbooks or Wave.
The feature set is genuinely complete for its scope — recurring invoices, Stripe integration, multi-currency with exchange rate providers, custom fields, and a customer portal are all there. The module system (install/enable/disable via the UI) gives it a reasonable extension story without requiring forks. The codebase is well-organized: controllers are single-action classes, requests handle validation separately, and the Admin/Customer namespace split is clean. Docker image and an installation wizard make self-hosting accessible without touching the CLI.
Last commit was August 2024 and the roadmap has a graveyard of unchecked items — vendors/bills, inventory, time tracking, payment reminders, debit/credit notes, and payroll are all listed as planned but untouched. The 'Blockchain Integration' and 'Web 3.0 Accounting' items are still on the roadmap, which tells you something about the era when active development peaked. The module marketplace is a paid SaaS add-on, so the open-source version is missing features the docs imply exist. Multi-company support is there but user permissions per-company are coarse — roles exist but the RBAC model is thin.