Get started with Shillinq: your first invoice

Shillinq is an open-source business-administration app for the Nextcloud workspace. It covers double-entry bookkeeping, sales and purchase invoicing, procurement, contract management, and bank reconciliation, all on top of OpenRegister. This first tutorial keeps it small: you install the app, get your bearings on the Financial overview dashboard, and create your first sales invoice with the quick draft. Everything happens in the browser, no configuration files.

1. Install Shillinq

1. Open Apps from your Nextcloud user menu (top right).
2. Find Shillinq in the Organization category, or install it from the Nextcloud App Store, and click Enable.
3. On first enable, Shillinq seeds its registers and schemas into OpenRegister and applies a Dutch chart of accounts (RGS). Give it a few seconds.
4. Open Shillinq from the app menu. You land on the Financial overview.

The very first time you open the app, a short Welcome to Shillinq tour offers to walk you through creating an invoice, exactly what the rest of this tutorial does by hand. Follow the tour or click Close tour and read on; either way you end up in the same place.

2. Read the Financial overview

The Financial overview is Shillinq's home screen. It reads straight from your bookkeeping register, so it is empty on a brand-new install and fills in as you record invoices, bills, and payments. If you enabled the demo data, you see realistic figures right away.

The KPI strip across the top gives you the numbers you check most:

Below the KPIs are the trend charts (turnover, margin, cashflow, billable hours), each with its own date chip in the top-right so you can change the period without leaving the page. At the bottom, two tables list the open debtors and open creditors that need attention. Every KPI card links through to the underlying list, so the dashboard doubles as a table of contents.

3. Create your first invoice with the quick draft

The fastest way to bill a customer is the quick draft. It asks only for what an invoice needs and fills in the technical bookkeeping fields (administration, period, invoice number) for you.

1. On the Financial overview, click Create invoice in the page header. The Quick draft invoice dialog opens.
2. In Customer, start typing a customer's name and pick them from the list. The list is your Shillinq customers; the due date is pre-filled from their payment terms.
3. Check the Invoice date (today by default) and Due date. Add a Reference / PO number if the customer wants one on the invoice.
4. Add a line under Line items: a Description, a Quantity, a Unit price, and the VAT rate (21% by default in the Netherlands). Use + Add line for more. The running Net / VAT / Total updates as you type.
5. Click Save draft.

Shillinq numbers the invoice, sets it to Draft status, and books it to Accounts receivable. Nothing has been sent to the customer yet, and it is not yet posted to the ledger; a draft is safe to edit or delete.

4. See it in Accounts receivable

1. Open Sales → Accounts receivable from the left navigation (or click the Open debtors KPI card).
2. Your new invoice is in the list, with its Invoice #, Customer, Invoice date, Due date, Total (EUR), and Status (draft).
3. Click the row to open the invoice. From the detail page you can refine the lines, then post and send it (as PDF, or as a UBL / Peppol e-invoice for Dutch government clients).

That is the core loop: create, review, post, send. Everything else in Shillinq, purchasing, contracts, bank reconciliation, VAT returns, hangs off the same bookkeeping register you just wrote your first record into.