5 Best Invoicing Software for Small Business Billing
The world has been experiencing a gradual yet definite shift from offline, paper-backed business activities and mode of operation to an online one.
Business transactions are now being conducted online via the internet more than ever before, facilitated by invoicing software. This approach ensures quick and convenient transactions that are also cost-effective for all parties involved.
This is in line with the digital transformation that we’ve been witnessing for years now. Whether your business takes place offline or online or both, getting paid for what you do still remains the most important element of your business.
In the digital age of online business transactions, whether you’re a freelancer or entrepreneur, efficient payment processing is crucial. Utilizing user-friendly invoicing software streamlines invoicing, billings, and prompt payments.
Especially if you’re in the process of learning or considering how to start a business, incorporating an invoicing system could be the most valuable addition. This holds true for both individuals who already own or aspire to start an eCommerce.
Just as online business offers convenience, invoicing software offers time-saving benefits. It automates data entry, minimizing manual tasks, and potentially cutting costs if you find a free option.
Timely payments are vital for business survival, and streamlined processes are invaluable. Invoicing software ensures accurate, glitch-free invoices, simplifying payment management for a smoother business operation.
Now, we would like to introduce you to some of the popular invoicing software options available. In the following sections of this guide, we will discuss what invoicing software is, its features, and the benefits it offers.”
FreshBooks
FreshBooks was initially created as a solution for invoice creation, and has now become a well recognized accounting and finance software for small businesses. It has a full array of features and solutions that gives plenty customer satisfaction.
FreshBooks has gone through several upgrades since it was created, expanding its scope with each update and has become very popular for this reason. It offers an easy to use, feature-rich interface that facilitates the creation of invoices and customer bills.
The reason for the success of FreshBooks is glaring; its focus on fulfilling the financial and accounting needs of small businesses and freelancers that constitute the bulk of its users.
Features of FreshBooks
Below are some of the features of FreshBooks:
- Invoice creation and customization: FreshBooks allows the creation and customization of invoices with its readily available templates that are easy to use.
- Allows recurring invoices: FreshBooks facilitates the creation and sending of invoices automatically. This is vital for recurring invoices with regular customers, as it eliminates the need to create separate invoices for the regular clients of a business
- Shows due date: The due date is important to notifying clients on how soon payments should be made. FreshBooks allows due dates to be quickly set so clients know clearly when payments should be made to you.
- Discounts and Deposits: It also allows you to request a deposit from customers, and allows discounts to be included in your invoice, allowing you to modify your invoice according to agreements you reached with your customers. It also allows you to preview your invoice before you forward to your client.
Cost of FreshBooks
Good invoicing software requires a monthly fee to access features. FreshBooks works the same way, as it has different plans for users depending on their budget and needs. It has four different plans and pricing options.
- Lite plan costs $15 a month
- Plus plan costs $25 a month
- Premium plan costs $50 a month And custom pricing is available as a level above premium
XERO
Xero is a leading cloud-based accounting software that has gained immense popularity for its efficient and user-friendly approach to financial management. With a strong emphasis on streamlining accounting processes, Xero has become a go-to solution for businesses of all sizes.
Features
Xero offers a rich array of features that cater to various financial needs:
- Invoicing Made Easy: Create and send professional invoices, and even set up automated reminders to ensure timely payments.
- Bank Reconciliation: Seamlessly connect your bank accounts and reconcile transactions, making manual data entry a thing of the past.
- Expense Tracking: Monitor and categorize expenses effortlessly, keeping your finances organized and providing clear insights into your business expenditures.
- Payroll Management: Handle employee payroll with ease, including calculating taxes and generating payslips.
- Financial Reporting: Generate comprehensive financial reports that offer insights into your company’s financial health, aiding in informed decision-making.
- Multi-Currency Support: Deal with international clients and suppliers confidently, with Xero’s support for multiple currencies.
Pricing of XERO
Xero’s pricing structure is designed to accommodate businesses of varying sizes:
- Early starts @ $9.75 and this plan allows you to send 20 invoices and quotes, reconcile bank transactions, send 5 bills, and handle payroll for one employee.
- Growing starts @ $24.05 and with this plan, you can send unlimited invoices and quotes, reconcile an unlimited number of bank transactions, and manage payroll for up to five employees.
- Established starts @ $35.00 and whit the premium plan offers all the features of the standard plan, along with the ability to handle payroll for an unlimited number of employees.
While Xero provides a range of options, the cost can vary depending on your business needs and the plan you select.
QuickBooks Intuit
QuickBooks is a comprehensive accounting software designed to simplify financial management for businesses of all sizes. With its user-friendly interface and a wide range of features, QuickBooks has become a go-to solution for efficient bookkeeping and financial tracking.
Features
QuickBooks offers an array of powerful features that cover every aspect of financial management. From expense tracking to invoicing, here are some standout features:
- Expense Tracking: Seamlessly monitor and categorize your expenses, making it easy to manage your budget.
- Invoicing: Generate professional invoices and send them to clients with ease. Customize templates and receive payments online for quicker transactions.
- Financial Reporting: Access a variety of pre-built reports that provide insights into your business’s financial health, helping you make informed decisions.
- Bank Reconciliation: Automatically sync with your bank accounts to reconcile transactions, ensuring accurate records.
- Payroll Management: Simplify payroll processing by calculating employee salaries, taxes, and deductions effortlessly.
- Integration: QuickBooks integrates with a multitude of third-party apps and tools, enhancing its functionality and adaptability.
Pricing of QuickBooks
QuickBooks offers different plans to cater to various business needs:
- Simple Start: An affordable option for solo entrepreneurs and startups with basic invoicing and expense tracking needs.
- Essentials: A more comprehensive plan that includes features like time tracking, bill management, and multi-user access.
- Plus: Ideal for growing businesses, this plan adds inventory tracking and project management to the Essentials features.
- Advance: provides enhanced features and capabilities for businesses seeking comprehensive financial management solutions.
Each plan comes with a monthly subscription fee, offering flexibility to scale up as your business expands. While the cost varies depending on the plan and any ongoing promotions, QuickBooks’ pricing is competitive compared to the value it brings to your financial management.
Zoho Invoice
Zoho invoice is a solution that supports small businesses and freelancers’ financial processes. It is popular for its flexible pricing options, feature-rich list and more. Zoho is a billing and invoicing website that is quite flexible.
Features of Zoho
- It allows data blending and merging from different sources
- It supports visual analysis of data and the building of reports via its interface
- It allows deep analytics to be conducted
- It has a variety of applications for businesses
- It allows data entry from multiple sources including spreadsheets, text files, online sources and more.
Cost of Zoho
Zoho had different solutions that were also priced differently. But now they are giving their invoicing tool for free! That’s a really good deal to boost your online business.
- Free FOREVER!
Invoicely
Invoicely has become a well-known solution for invoice creation and account records and reconciliation. Its strength lies in the accounting reports functions I provides and its support for multiple currencies, though it lacks some features you can find in other solutions.
Features
Invoicely supports multiple countries and their currencies and has in built reports that are quite handy. Most of the features are available for a token, and it has invoice customization and time tracking. Invoicely comes with a full invoicing and accounting tools for your business. Take the tour to see why you’ll love it as much as we do.
Pricing of Invoicely
There are four plans that allow you to adapt gradually invoicely at the same time your business grow:
- Free plan allows you to just start running your small business and discover what this software can do for you
- Basic plan starts @ $9.99 per month being able to send up to 100 monthly invoices and save 25 clients
- Professional plan starts @ $19.99 per month and it will suite your growing necessities sending 250 invoices and saving 100 clients.
- Enterprise plan, here is where the things get serious starting @ $29.99 per month you will be able to send and save unlimited invoices and clients.
Definitely Invoicely it can be your invoicing software for long time being able to adapt to the growth of your company
What is Invoicing Software
Billing or invoicing software is used to automate activities related to preparing and issuing bills and invoices to the clients of a business. This kind of software permits the creation and immediate sending of invoices to clients.
That’s the basic function of invoice software, though a plethora of invoice making software exists, and each has various functions and capacity. The newer invoice software take things up several notches by introducing a host of features to the billing process; some allow the creation of proposals, estimates, allow payment options to be synchronized with the invoice, and allow expenses to be tracked.
With the use of invoicing software, you can automatically generate bills for the services you’ve rendered for your clients. The software creates an entry of the products, transactions and services and their respective costs that are then sent to your customers.
How invoicing software help you save time expended by the manual entry process is by employing already made templates that make the invoice and billing process quicker. Efficiency, speed and productivity are some of the advantages that invoicing software provide.
Features of Invoicing Software
Invoicing software is now widely available with varying uses, functionalities, pricing and features. They all perform the basic required function of creating and sending invoices to customers. The following are some commonly shared features of invoicing software that you should look out for while selecting invoicing software for your business:
Creation of invoices
This is the primary, most basic function of invoicing and billing software. They support the creation of professional and customizable invoices for your company. The software allow the entering and customization of data related to transactions done for customers. Integration of data for customer transaction records and projects is another thing allowed by this software.
Creation and modification of customer records
Invoicing software also allow the creation and modification of customer records. This allows you to personalize the information and purchase/transaction history of individual customers in a tidy manner. The way these records are created allows simple access to the records of customers
Payment Gateway Integration
Although not all invoicing software has this feature, it has become an important part of the billing process, and should be part of your consideration for selecting the software for you. Invoicing software should have a billing and payment processing gateway for prompt payment and security.
This is especially important for automating payments from recurring customers as the right software allow auto-billing.
Ready-Made Templates
The way bills and invoices are presented is equally important. This is why invoicing software have a bunch of in-built ready-made templates for creating and presenting invoices to your customers.
Good invoicing software must include professional and easy to modify templates for the personalization of invoices. It also saves the time involved with creating a template yourself.
Information Processing
Information processing is one of the features of invoicing software that are vital to a hitch-free billing process. The software allows information to be processed, received and sent. The information related to customer transactions that are stored on the software’s database can be produced and modified on demand.
Why you should use Invoicing Software
Invoicing software introduces a host of efficient and time-saving features to the customer transaction record and billing process. They manage all the functions and activities related to invoice creation and customer-billing efficiently. But that’s not all, good invoicing software should also provide the following benefits:
Prompt and accurate creation of invoices
Invoicing software allow the creation of fast and accurate invoices. Particularly when compared to the manual invoice creation process, invoicing software is inherently more accurate and better.
They allow the inclusion of all the vital details of a customer transaction like invoice number, description of the service provided or product sold, the date of the transaction and service/product delivery, details of the customer, total amount due ad due date of the payment, and finally the accepted payment gateways.
Invoicing software allows the automation of entry and modification of all this data, and as such minimizes errors and improves accuracy.
Allow the creation of invoices from anywhere
Unlike the manual process that requires the creation of invoices from an office on a spreadsheet of transactions, invoicing software allow the creation of invoices from anywhere because their process is internet-based. It allows you to create invoices from any location that has an internet connection.
Minimize the occurrence of errors
A major advantage that software offers over manual processes is the minimization of errors that occur with manual processes. Invoicing software help ensure a prompt creation of invoices and fast-track the invoicing and billing process in a way that enables payments to be received on time, and as such minimizes the occurrence of late payments.
The organization of data and synchronization with business activities permitted by this software boosts revenue generation.
Automation of vital financial processes
Invoicing software enable the automation of crucial financial procedures. This enables costs related to these processes to be reduced. It also allows the synchronization of financial processes and cuts down the time spent to enter customer data and create invoices, which leads to faster payment and a smoother billing process.
This also reduces the occurrence of late payments as there are less errors.
It secures Transactions and details
Invoicing software vary by efficacy and features. The good invoicing software should provide security in addition to seamless invoice creation and billing process. Securing the invoice creation and billing processes has become vital in this age of Internet fraud and Email compromise scams.
Good invoice software must provide high-level security to ensure that your company and customers details are not compromised and are protected from scams. You don’t get this level of security with a manual invoice creation and billing process that requires you to send the invoices and your payment details by easy-to-compromise email.
Conclusion
We have covered everything from what CRT and SEO stand for, what is their importance in relation to each other, and how to maximize your CRT. You can use this comprehensive guide to understand more about search engine optimization and how to improve yours.
Keep in mind that the growth isn’t instant and it might take you quite a while to get from the third position on the result page to the second position.
But you have to keep using new strategies and testing new SEO tools to finally reach the first rank on the result page and to get high CRTs.