Small Business Accounting
Online Billing Service Review: BillMyClients.com
Online invoicing and billing solutions have come of age. We take a look at BillMyClients.com, a web-based e-invoicing solution that provides a powerful yet elegantly simple billing solution that is perfect for small business owners and freelancers.
For small business owners, billing is both a joy and a pain.
The good news is you will soon be collecting money. The bad news is you have to generate invoices to get there.
In one of my startup companies, I used to bill clients using an Excel spreadsheet invoicing template. Using Excel to generate invoices worked reasonably well. I would open up the template, fill in the client information, key in the invoice line items, and generate the invoice as an Acrobat PDF file. I would then email the PDF to my client.
The downside of this Excel invoicing solution was that it was tough to keep those invoices organized on my hard drive. When I needed to find an invoice, it was difficult. When I started using a laptop in addition to my hard drive, it was tough to remember which computer had the invoice I needed. Regrettably, in one hard drive crash, I lost a bunch of my invoices.
BillMyClients.com is a service that eliminates these problems, making it easy to invoice clients. All the billing you do with the service is online invoicing, so there's a permanent, organized repository of billing information.
The service lets you quickly and easily create and print invoices and bills. You can then send those same invoices via e-mail and the United States Postal Service.
You can use their invoice wizard to help you create your invoice. Just enter the necessary information about your goods or service and contact information for your client. Then you can store the invoice for future additions or send it immediately.
If you like, you can set up an invoice so that it is automatically sent out on a recurring basis. There is also an optional feature that lets you accept Paypal payments from your clients for your invoices.
BillMyClients.com keeps copies of all your invoices. That makes them easy to access for tax preparation purposes. At any time, you can log into your invoice manager to mark an invoice paid, or to take a look at outstanding invoices. If an invoice hasn't been paid, you can send a reminder.
I really like these web-hosted business applications because you can do your work anytime, anywhere.
This is a great billing and invoicing solutions for freelancers and small business owners. The alternatives are too simple (e.g. Excel invoice templates) or too complex (e.g. Quickbooks accounting software). This online invoicing system strikes just the right balance between ease-of-use and sophistication.
As a quick disclaimer on this review, we were solicited to write this review via a fee-based review system. But we'd eventually have gotten around to reviewing BillMyClients.com, so we were happy to get the prod to review the service sooner rather than later.
We think this is an excellent solution for electronic invoicing, which we've advocated for some time.
If you want to streamline invoicing, BillMyClients.com is definitely worth looking at. You can create a trial account for no charge and see how it works. There are a number of pricing structures, so you should be able to find something that fits your invoicing needs to a tee.
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