Regardless of the size of your company, sending invoices & tracking expenses is an obvious part of doing business. Online-invoicing services enable you to send invoices and estimates, web-based time tracking (which is good if you want to monitor how much time you spend on each project or task within a project), and expenses that your business picks up along the way.
If your business has grown to a size that you have several clients and/or employees then the choice of keeping records of invoice & expense is no longer an option. Whether you are a current online-invoicing user or will soon be, then be certain to check out the services that offer tax/expense tracking.
FreshBooks seems to offer many additional accounting-type integrated services for the small business invoice application user. Many of these invoicing services rivaled traditional bookkeeping software like QuickBooks. While other invoicing services like Paymo offer services such as a downloadable client-side time clock to track time against an allocated project or task.
No one disputes that online invoicing has made doing business more organized for independent/freelance businesses, but at what price? Most online invoicing services offer a spectrum of services, but only the basic services (invoicing/expenses) seem to be the common core. Investigating the specialized services (e.g. expense tracking for taxes [that is compatible with your tax software]) is key when trying to differentiate between the herd of invoicing like-services out there.
Regardless of which service you end up using, I did notice that all of them appeared to have solid web hosting – no hanging or locking up. I have experienced many more errors/troubles with the free version of Quicken “Starter” that I downloaded. So performance shouldn’t be an issue with any of these services. Here is a list of the services I researched, and the ones mentioned throughout this post seem to be the ones that offered the most bang for the buck.
http://www.blinksale.com/home
http://www.freshbooks.com/
http://www.simplyinvoices.com/
http://www.paymo.biz/
http://pulseapp.com/
http://www.simplifythis.com/
http://www.getcashboard.com/
http://www.chronopipe.com/
http://lessaccounting.com/
http://invoicemachine.com/home
http://www.cannybill.com/index.html
http://invotrak.com/
The high point to online-invoicing is that most of these services will let you setup an account for free, and send 1 to 3 invoices a month without paying. This will get you ‘in the door’ to examine the control panel – hopefully to explore more of the differences – allowing you to find which services are important to you – maybe even finding something you didn’t even know you needed(?)… Once you have all your vendors setup/all the account addresses entered, it becomes easier to just stay with your online-invoice provider rather than going through the trouble to switch. So spending some time exploring your expense/invoicing needs, before you commit, may spare you from – the more time-consuming & painful job of changing invoicing providers.
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Online Invoicing Pimps – The First One (Or Three) Is Free
