It is a pleasure to announce the new Kraft version 2.1.0 today.

Kraft is an free software app for effective invoicing and business document management on Linux desktops. It is specifically targetted to small business needs and ensures data privacy.

The new version is the second release of the Kraft 2 generation.

It continues to deliver on the goals we set at beginning of the year with Kraft 2: More formally correct documents to better match legal requirements. Moreover the file based storage backend for simplicity and privacy aware cloud support was continued. With that Kraft will be the perfect solutions for work teams.

This release brings a lot of detail improvements for users, such as:

• With a special markout of certain document types as invoice-type lets Kraft provide invoice-specific features such as the benefit period or XRechnung generation that other doc types like offers do not need
• Draft documents can be deleted now which was not possible before
• The creation of custom formatted document templates for PDF generation of the docs is way easier now: Kraft can display a list of all variables that can be referenced in the template, along with their meaning and an example value based on the selected document

Also, XRechnung support for electronic invoicing on Linux is continously improved.

Under the hood, a lot of bug fixes and improvements make Kraft even better, mainly by saving more data as files in the filesystem to enable cloud sync. The UI got enhanced by a bunch of efficiency raising improvements. That supports all users who have better ideas of spending their days than fiddling on the computer to get an invoice out even better.

This release comes with codename Happy Birthday KDE 💙!

That means that we want to congratulate KDE which turned 30 this year! Many thanks to the great KDE community and what it did to the open source eco system. Kraft also would not exist without KDE and the lovely community.

As usual, Kraft is very open for contributions via Github. Thanks to all the contributors.

Kraft provides effective invoicing and document management for small businesses on Linux. Check the feature list.

This new version is a big step ahead for the project. It does not only deliver the outstanding ports to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6 and tons of modernizations and cleanups, but for the first time, it also does some significant changes in the underlying architecture and drops outdated technology.

Kraft now stores documents not longer in a relational database, but as XML documents in the filesystem. While separate files are more natural for documents anyway, this is paving the way to let Kraft integrate with private cloud infrastructures like OpenCloud or Nextcloud via sync. That is not only for backup- and web-app-purposes, but also for synced data that enables to run Kraft as distributed system. An example is if office staff works from different home offices. Expect this and related usecases to be supported in the near future of Kraft.

But there are more features: For example, the document lifecycle was changed to be more compliant: Documents remain in a draft status now until they get finalized, when they get their final document number. From that point on, they can not longer be altered.

There is too much on the long Changes-List to mention here.

However, what is important is that after more than 20 years of developing and maintaining this app, I continue to be motivated to work on this bit. It is not a big project, but I think it is important that we have this kind of “productivity”-applications available for Linux to make it attractive for people to switch to Linux.

Around Kraft, a small but beautiful community has built up. I like to thank everybody who contributed in any way to Kraft over the years. It is big fun to work with you all!

If you are interested, please get in touch.