Perfect Billing
For another business, we needed an online facility to email time and service invoices to clients, and track their payments with minimal hassle.
To make life easy, we set up a PayPal account and verified it, and also a Google Checkout account – we recently found an article recommending using both – which seemed pretty level headed. Since this new invoicing method is an experiment, we thought we’d use it as a way to assess preference between the two.
We then set out to find an Invoicing system that we could use. The criteria were
- Low running costs (free if possible)
- Handle a client list starting with half a dozen existing contacts
- Handle one invoice per week
- Support for Google Checkout and Paypal as clickable payment links
- Allow quotes to convert to invoices
- Track payment completion
- Email invoices instantly
We didn’t find a free of charge solution that satisfied all criteria, but our final two contenders were SimplyBill.com and Freshbooks.com – we signed up test accounts on both.
Here and now, we’ll review SimplyBill.com because that’s the one we chose after trying them out.
Signing up is quick and easy. Enter a business name and contact details, choose an account name and password and you’re off. There are four levels on offer, Free, Basic, Enhanced and Premium. We opted for Basic – which at $5 per month is the cheapest subscription we saw anywhere that allows unlimited clients, and with an allowance of more than one invoice per business day (25 per month) it suits us just fine. Quotes are created easily, and convert to invoices with a single click. Immediately upon login the Dashboard shows Overdue, Open and Closed invoices, along with an account snapshot for the current month. Perfect. Overdue invoices are easily chased with a quick automated message… very easy.
The only criteria not satisifed was Google Checkout integration. Freshbooks.com had just added it, but at $19.99 per month minimum subscription, we felt that $14 extra was a lot to pay to satisfy one criterion. Maybe SimplyBill would talk to us about it? We don’t normally expect a positive response when we ask for extra features, but we gave it a go.
We contacted SimplyBill using their contact form to ask if they plan to offer Google Checkout integration, and
within an hour they said they’ll take a look at doing it “over the coming week or two”. Excellent. This kind of positivity and quick response is an indication of someone caring about their product and their subscribers.
That concern out of the way, we set up an Invoice header – just a matter of uploading a graphic of the right dimensions, and created a bunch of test invoices with different test headers which all emailed out perfectly. The invoice layout looks great… no complaints there. It would be nice to have control of fonts and use our own house style, but its an invoice after all, not a presentation document.
Frustrations and negatives are few. Only these:
- We entered a temporary email address for the company when setting up the account, and we now find that can’t be changed (by us anyway) on our account details page. We’ll ask SimplyBill if they can change it for us, since they’ve been so helpful already we have some confidence it will be OK.
- When printing out a quote, it doesn’t print at A4 size. This isn’t a huge problem because we’ll be emailing them anyway, but our reference copies will be harder to read.
- There’s no test mode, so we had to waste invoice allowance on test prints. Every time we adjusted the header we had to create a new invoice to see it in print. We assume our clients will print out the invoices we email, so we need to be sure they’ll look good.
In summary, we’re surprised at how quickly we could make a decision, but SimplyBill.com made it easy for us. And not only that, it’s British!