The PSA where the billing actually reaches your accountant.
ITFlow is a genuinely good free, self-hosted tool for documentation, passwords and basic ticketing. Where it leaves you is the accounting side: invoices live in their own silo with no Xero or QuickBooks sync, so you re-key them by hand. Opentra keeps the self-hosted, own-your-data part and makes billing the thing it does best.
ITFlow details reflect publicly listed pricing and positioning and change often — verify current pricing with the vendor. For orientation, not a quote.
Who it’s for
You already run ITFlow. You like that it is free and that the data sits on your own box. But every month you export totals and re-key them into your accounting software, your time entries are typed in from memory rather than captured as you work, and the billing side always feels like the part that was added last.
You do not want to give up self-hosting or hand your client book to a cloud vendor. You just want the invoicing half to be as solid as the documentation half.
The honest case for ITFlow
ITFlow is real, open-source (GPL), and free, and it is strong exactly where Opentra deliberately is not. It is an IT documentation and password-vault tool first: assets, licences, domains, SSL, an encrypted password vault, client docs, with ticketing and invoicing alongside.
If your main need is documentation and a password manager you host yourself, and you are happy to keep invoicing in-app and hand-key it into your books, ITFlow is a fair, capable choice, and free is hard to argue with. Opentra does not try to replace your documentation vault; it integrates Hudu for that and does the service-desk-to-invoice job instead.
Where Opentra wins
Billing that reaches your accountant. Approved time and contract lines push straight into Xero, with per-org rate overrides and rounding rules applied, so month-end is a review, not a re-typing job.
Time captured, not remembered. Live timers persist on the ticket as the tech works and become clean billable lines, instead of hours entered by hand after the fact.
Email that knows who it is from. MS Graph ingestion opens tickets and resolves the true client contact even on forwarded and automated mail, not just the sending address.
Delivery included. Phases, tasks, dependencies, milestones and quote-to-project conversion, with token-based client approval portals, are part of the core, not a separate tool.
A paid support path when you need one. ITFlow is community-only; Opentra stays free to self-host but offers priority support and an SLA on paid tiers for the shops that want someone to call.