Creating Invoices in the command line

Just stumbled upon this gem, and my laziness got some ideas

I stumbled upon this nifty invoice project, which is also available in homebrew: brew install invoice.

Usage is as simple as:

invoice generate --from "Dream, Inc." --to "Imagine, Inc." \
    --item "Rubber Duck" --quantity 2 --rate 25 \
    --tax 0.13 --discount 0.15 \
    --note "For debugging purposes."

I can even use a config file which would be a lot easier to maintain:

invoice generate --import path/to/data.json \
    --output duck-invoice.pdf

{
  "logo": "/path/to/image.png",
  "from": "Dream, Inc.",
  "to": "Imagine, Inc.",
  "tax": 0.13,
  "items": ["Yellow Rubber Duck", "Special Edition Plaid Rubber Duck"],
  "quantities": [5, 1],
  "rates": [25, 25]
}

This got me a couple of ideas to automate my invoice sending errands, one of which is to simply pull data each month and generate the JSON file and then pipe it to the invoice command.

However, I don’t want to spend money for a proper SaaS to send emails, and plus, I want the emails to seem to come from me personally, so this is what I need to explore next. Office 365 has Power Automate, maybe that’s something I can use 🤔