SI Works blog

As a few friends and clients will know we've been investigating starting to use an online billing system that will help us become more efficient with our invoicing process.

Freshbooks

A really easy to use the application, neat Ajax interface!

What I really liked was that the application allows your clients to interact, print, save their invoices to PDF and view their own statements at any given time, without having to mail me and ask for a statement, which is really great

The invoices are only customisable by adding a logo, nothing else can be customised, however in saying this the invoice layout really is super.

Their customer support was awesome, I got a personal message from Jon (Thanks Jon) and had a nice general chit chat with him about the application and he helped with any of my questions.
My only gripe are that you can't send the invoice as a PDF attachment, which is nice to have! Perhaps we'll suggest this to them.

The Invoice Machine

The Invoice Machine has a really neat slick ajax(ish) interface, yet not as simple as Freshbooks

It took me a little longer to set up "set items" for monthly items that need to be billed, perhaps their interface could be simplified and packed with a couple of small usability triggers.

There's a really great little timing device that allows you to time your work, and allocate that to an invoice.
Their API is neatly written and pretty well documented, if Freshbooks was not around, this would be my first choice, for sure!

BlinkSale

First thing that impressed me was their customer support, a small chat on the site popped up while I was signing up, addressing any issues I had, nice touch!

A neat(ish) interface, however not as user-friendly as I would liked, a few too many steps between certain sections.

They have the most customisable invoice templates out of all the applications, however that was only for the email invoice. The PDF is formatted differently.

You can only integrate with Paypal as a payment solution, and no other providers, Freshbooks integrates with about 10 different payment solutions.

Billing Boss

Ajaxish feel but not very slick, the interface looks very "Shiny" little too much for me.

Can't add preset items (although you might be able to, I could not find anything)

No really obvious place to add VAT, so I never took it any further

I could not set the default currency to ZAR, kept having to choose it, and the interface and error messages are not intuitive.

Simply Invoice

Way too focused on the US market, so I certainly would not use this application. It has a slow interface, and cannot set up recurring invoices.

Customization of PDF and interface is not possible, and as such I didn't even bother checking out the rest of this application.

Cashboard

This application has a nice ajaxish interface, which performs fairly well - however, it is a little confusing (too many options) when setting up a schedule invoice.

I can't add common "Items" to pick from that I use on a monthly basis, for example we do hosting and want to add our monthly packages, and this is a 'must have' for our needs.

The interface should have an Add button on the page you're on instead at the top of the interface in one place, a little less easy to use this way.

One thing which was important, which was not blindingly obvious is that I can't put a default VAT(Tax) amount in the invoices

Overall not TERRIBLE, but certainly not something we would use for the future.

Invoice Place

The interface is really old fashion, small little tabs and certainly an historic way of creating invoices, not very slick at all. I also got a nice Java status 500 Error when trying to create an invoice template, so that was the end of that, overall not impressed.

Invoice Quick

The interface took ages to register on, more than 4 steps before I could even do anything, I also found that the interface is REALLY slow to use and most of the actions I tried to perform (like adding a new invoice) simply didn't work, it timed out, I could not even get further than adding an invoice, I certainly would NOT use this