Top 6 Online Invoicing Services For Your Business

Posted on February 12th, 2010
A blog post by DN (1 Comment)

Every business that works for profit needs to deal with customer invoices one way or the other. At the earliest stages, the owners and founders can manage everything themselves, but once the number of sales goes over a few hundred a week, it becomes too time-consuming and difficult to track the invoices manually.

Just a couple of decades ago, the solution to this problem was delegating the work to hired employees (whole departments for big companies), who would track all the sales and send the customer bills.

With the advent of the Internet and web-based services, this task has become a lot easier and cheaper to execute. Now, a small business owner can easily manage over a hundred sales per week spending only one hour per day for the invoicing. And if the company is profitable, one or two hired workers (who can even be in a remote location) will be enough to handle thousands of weekly transactions.

Let’s take a look at the best and most reliable online services and software that will help you manage all of your business invoices:

• 1. Freshbooks. This service is considered to be the leader in online invoicing. It offers a full array of standard invoicing and billing features, plus some fairly advanced time tracking and subcontractor management services. They can be integrated with a lot of other accounting and project management services like Basecamp and QuickBooks. They have a free plan (with some limitations, of course) and a few paid plans, which are perfect for small businesses of different sizes.
• 2. AcceptPay.
  This is an online invoicing solution from American Express. It is quite new, but with the backing of such a large corporation, you can be sure it is very reliable and it offers all the features you need. They offer a free option called AcceptPay Lite, which is limited to 10 invoices per month (just enough for testing the service, really) and a full, $20/month version, which accepts online payments, ACH and eChecks and can be integrated with QuickBooks.
• 3. BambooInvoice.
  Not really an online service, BambooInvoice is a full, open-source software backend and frontend for invoicing, which means you can host it on your own server. This gives you and your business the possibility to have full control over your own online invoicing service, but it also means you will have to spend a little more time maintaining it. The basic install will give you all the standard features with no limits, and you can easily extend and customize it however you want by hiring a programmer to write and integrate the necessary scripts for you.
• 4. CurdBee.
  This service is aimed at small businesses, one-man operations and freelancers. It has a free plan with unlimited invoices and customers and supports integration with Paypal and Google Checkout. The downside of the free plan is a relatively big CurdBee logo that is included in every email and invoice you send, in addition to the “powered by CurdBee” notice. You can easily remove it by choosing the paid plan, which is only $5/month.
• 5. Endeve.
  This is a very good service that offers a full free plan, with an unlimited number of invoices and customers. The paid version is $20/month and includes support for Paypal Pay Now buttons and allows you to manage your expenses and create customized invoice layouts.
• 6. PaySimple.
  A service for larger small businesses that offers a lot of advanced features like recurring billing and credit card payments. You can send manual and automatic invoices and accept ACH, eChecks, online payments and credit card payments. The paid plan is $35/month, for which you receive all their services, together with a merchant account.

There are dozens of other online invoicing services and desktop software, but the ones listed above have proven themselves to be the best. One thing is for sure – using any one of them will dramatically reduce the time needed to manage your day-to-day business operations.