This is a build update from Zorderz.
Zorderz is small business management software you install on your own WordPress site, free and open source on GitHub.
Today’s release, version 1.2, is about standing on its own.
We made Zorderz lean less on outside services for the basics, starting with invoicing.
Small business management software you can start with
Until now, sending an estimate or an invoice meant connecting Zorderz to an outside billing service.
That is still the best setup if you already pay for one, and Zorderz still connects to those.
But not every business has one yet, and some just want to begin.
So version 1.2 includes a basic estimate and invoice generator built right in.
You build an estimate from your own price list, turn it into an invoice with one click, and record payments against it until it is paid.
It all works with no outside service connected, on the site you already own.
What this is, and what it is not
This is on purpose a floor, not a full billing platform.
It creates the documents and tracks the payments, and that is where it stops.
It is not a comprehensive invoicing system, and it is not a customer relationship manager.
Customer relationship management software stores and runs the whole relationship with each customer: their contact details, the history of every deal and conversation, the sales pipeline, and the reports built on all of it.
Zorderz is not trying to be that.
Why we are holding that line
WordPress was built to run a website, not to be the filing cabinet for a company’s entire customer history.
If we copied a full customer relationship manager inside it, we would pack the database with data it was never meant to hold, and every app would get slower for it.
So we are keeping the built-in tools light on purpose.
For anything heavier, the plan is to connect to the software you already use, rather than rebuild it.
What comes next
We will keep improving how Zorderz connects to outside tools, so it can read your existing systems and set itself up to match.
We also plan to connect Zorderz to an open source customer relationship manager down the road, for people who want one without paying for a closed one.
That is a future goal, not today’s.
Today’s was simpler: let a business run on Zorderz alone from day one.
How this gets built
Every release is made the same way.
A human guides the work, Claude, a large language model from Anthropic, writes the code and the drafts, and I review, test, and decide what ships.
Version 1.2 is live on GitHub now, both the theme and the apps, at the same version number.
You can read or run the code on GitHub.
You can download this release, the theme and the apps, from the version 1.2 release page.
Carleton