I hate accounting, especially invoicing. It's a repetitive, mind-boggling task, that steals away my energy; thus should be handled by a machine. Believe me, I would give my pinky toe if I never ever had to do it again. At most I just want to scribble a few notes and be done with it. Maybe Tyler King hat the same thoughts while he created Markdown Invoice to solve the problem. It turns Markdown invoices into HTML or PDF. Of course his tool is totally rad, so I borrowed it and adjusted it to my own needs. This somehow grew out of my hand and I added a bunch of features and gave it a new name - karban. Karban is a hacker-friendly, static invoice generator. It's kinda like Jekyll, but for invoices.

How?

Simple. Put your invoices into the invoices/ directory. See sample.md for an example invoice in Markdown and its PDF output.

Example run:

./karban --invoice="invoices/2424-11-04-xxx" --output=pdf --layout="layouts/unicorns.html"
Compiling invoice "invoices/2424-11-04-xxx"...
PDF saved to: invoices/2424-11-04-xxx.pdf

Features

• Fancy HTML/CSS invoice layouts (with separate headers and footers) using Twig
• PDF output
• Meta data using YAML FrontMatter
• Multiple layouts
• Keep a plain text version of your invoices. Text files are awesome.
• Completely adaptable to your own workflow

./karban --help
Usage:
 karban [-f|--format[="..."]] [-o|--output[="..."]] [-l|--layout[="..."]] [invoice]

Arguments:
 invoice               Name of an invoice in Markdown format

Options:
 --format (-f)         Format can be HTML or PDF (default: "pdf")
 --output (-o)         Output directory for the generated envoice
 --layout (-l)         Layout for invoice (default: "layouts/layout.html")
 --help (-h)           Display this help message.
 --quiet (-q)          Do not output any message.
 --verbose (-v)        Increase verbosity of messages.
 --version (-V)        Display this application version.
 --ansi                Force ANSI output.
 --no-ansi             Disable ANSI output.
 --no-interaction (-n) Do not ask any interactive question.

Installation

Instructions for Mac

Step 1: Karban requires PHP 5.4 or higher. If you have an older version of PHP make an upgrade

 curl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 5.4

Step 2: Make PHP 5.4 your standard distribution

 export PATH=/usr/local/php5/bin:$PATH
 (write this into your ~/.profile to make it permament)

Step 3: Install composer

 curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
 sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Step 4: Download Karban

 git clone https://github.com/mre/karban.git

Step 5: Go into the Karban folder and run composer

 cd karban && composer install

Credits

All credits go to Tyler King who created the original Markdown Invoice.

Note

At the moment you have to fiddle around with the page breaks when things go awry. That's a known issue caused by wkhtmltopdf. Yeah, it sucks; the only alternative might be to look for an alternative or wait for a proper fix since all the available hacks are messy. For the time being, you can use <div class="pagebreak"></div> anywhere in your markdown invoice to force a page break.