It’s been a long while since my last release of the Amberdms Billing System (ABS), but at last I’ve finished merging in and testing all the new features that were worked on during my time running Amberdms with two other great coders and prepared a new stable release and documentation.

If you’re not familiar with ABS, it’s an open source billing system providing double-entry accounting, invoicing (with PDF generation), customer management, service billing (including telco usage billing) and time sheeting and billing functionality.

It’s been used by a couple smaller ISPs in New Zealand as well as various open source users around the world and is extremely flexible and powerful software (in my biased opinion). :-)

Accounting and billing isn’t a sexy application… but it needs to get done.

The major developments of this release include:

• New invoice templates using HTML/CSS with Webkit as a rendering engine to produce stunning PDF invoices.
• Numerous improvements and additions to the customer management page.
• Credit notes & customer credit balance management.
• Easier bulk handling of payments with bulk payment interface and (beta) bank statement import function.
• Support for VoIP billing, including charging customers for all calls made based on a configurable call record database as the source.
• Service bundling to group multiple services together to form packages.

If you’re running a business, particularly a service or technology orientated company, I invite you to take a look and check out ABS. Even if you’re using an existing accounting system like Xero, ABS is a great fit for the billing requirements and is a great base to use, rather than building your own in house billing platform.

You can read the release announcement details here, or go directly to the open source project page and download the installation guides and source code.