Cashboard is a great tool. Don't know what I would do without out it

Lia,

I'm not sure how many clients you have, or teams of clients, but I like Freshbooks. They offer a free service up to, I believe, 3-5 client teams. The thing I like best about them is that they have a forum where you can discuss needs, and wants, or work out a special "kink" you may have when it comes to billing your clients. You virtually (no punn intended), would not have to print ANY paper invoices. They store all the invoices on line for both you and your clients to access at anytime through secure passwords that you set up for each client (or client team). And, they offer a Ticket area where your clients can log in then request a job from you... you can respond with an estimate through the system, or just complet the task and bill them out. You set the parameters of when payments are accepted... immediately, 15 days, 30 days, etc. And they have a task timing tool to help break down your billable hours; again something that can be customized to breakdown to the 1/2 hour, hour, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, etc. You can set up the system to accept credit card payments through Paypal or another aggregate if you choose. And, there is no time contract with them, you can upgrade the service to handle more people at a very reasonable rate, and they're continually working on making the system better.

I personally use Freshbooks in combination with my Microsoft Money for Business or business forecasting purposes... but much of that could be done through a good Excel spreadsheet as well.

Hope that helps you (or anyone else exploring this topic),

Tanya

Tanya,
That sounds like a good program! I will have a look into it I have no clients currently so I'm up to investigating at the moment! I will have a look at cashbooks too

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Julia Neal ...because we ♥ admin!
http://julianeal.wordpress.com

Lia,

After you've looked at both of those options, if you have any questions about Freshbooks feel free to contact me. I've only been using them for about 2 1/2 weeks now; where I had been previously only been using M.Money. But, my clients seem to really appreciate the switch so that they can review their invoices and work orders anytime, anywhere they have an internet connection.

Tanya

This is great! I personally use excel and it is simple and fast. Once you have one invoice on file it is pretty easy and straight forward to do it manually. Your info is already on the invoice and so are you payment terms, calculations etc. All you have to do is fill in the clients info and the service and that's pretty much it. then you can save it as a pdf file (if you don't have a pdf converter you can go to the microsoft site to download it free) and send it to the client via email.

Originally Posted by Lia-VSS

Hi, as you all know I am trying to improve ways on saving the environment and what not. I am currently looking at online invoicing software, and have only seem to find this one - http://www.businessitonline.com/invoicing-software.aspx however I am not sure whether to have it or not. What do you all think, should I do it for a trial run? cheers. p.s. forgot to add, it needs to be free!

I found this one today that might help:

I don't know if anyone has looked into this but it looks interesting. I found it mentioned in a NYT article about making long distance partnerships work (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/bu...HqCloU9HFLM8lQ).

http://billingorchard.com/

It looks like it offers both hourly billing and recurring billing (retainers). It also has payment methods built in (paypal) and does auto invoicing. What's kind of nice is that you can enter your hours as you go and it totals them up for you. There's a 15 day free trial but the monthly fees seem ok.

You can also add a "support ticket" option which looks interesting. It looks like ti could easily be used to have clients request new projects so you can track it all through one system.

Anyway, I'll probably do the free trial at some point but I wanted to let others know about it too.

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Amanda Moore
Virtual Assistant
VagabondetteVA Blog

Freshbooks offers all of those same features, plus customizes a page to simulate the look and feel of your own website so clients feel that "connection" when they're logging on to to review the work order (tickets), their current invoices or past/historical invoices. It doesn't charge per number of invoices per month, only the number of users (clients/customers/employees) who have access each month. The first 5 are free (3 clients, you, and 1 employee), then I think it goes to $14 a month up to 25 active clients, plus you and 1 employee. You can time track your billing with a time tracking widget they have on there, set up future invoices, send out estimates, share documents if you want, and more.

I don't get a thing for 'promoting' this company... I'm just that excited about its usability, affordability, and my clients' positive responses since I've started using it. They really like have a secure login/password to track all of this stuff for them, and I don't have to save it on my hard drive or 3rd party software.

that freshbook thing looks brilliant - it looks brilliant for the first 3 clients but I really like Business IT online

I will sign up to both and then see which one I prefer

__________________
Julia Neal ...because we ♥ admin!
http://julianeal.wordpress.com

Great resources given by the ladies above.. I would also like to mention to keep in mind that not everyone has the capability to create invoices online.. So it would be a great idea to also list some of the invoicing software that does not require internet access for the professionals that are viewing this particular thread.. QuickBooks(unless you want to subscribe to services that require internet access), Excel, Microsoft Works ETC.... Just my little baby 2 cents...

This is a great spread. I have researched all the ones mentioned. I personally like Cashboard