It’s highly critical to get paid fast and easily. Ensuring there’s a proper cash flow in your investment is most important.
The right small business invoicing software can help you accomplish this. It helps you set up recurring invoicing to get paid constantly from regular customers while submitting bulk invoices by email to many or single customers. Even critical is mobile compatibility to easily invoice clients whether on your desktop or out there via Smartphones and Tablets. Even better, invoicing software guarantees invoices submitted are protected from illegal access and unauthorized changes.
To choose the best invoicing softwaretoday for your small business, here are top five you might want to check out.
Invoicera: Top invoicing software catering for at least five users offering unlimited invoices up to a hundred customers and a hundred recurring payments on its lowest payment plan.
Viewpost: Quality invoicing software catering for at least 10 users offering lots of unlimited features from unlimited invoices, unlimited recurring payments to catering for unlimited customers on its free version.
FreshBooks: Useful invoicing software catering for unlimited users for at least 50 customers with unlimited invoices and unlimited recurring payments on its $25 lowest plan.
Xero: Offers small businesses a feature to submit five invoice and quotes, entering five bills and 20 bank transactions reconciliation affordably from $9 per month plan.
PDFelement: Offers a great collection of invoice templates you can freely download, sign, print, edit and fill through its feature-rich PDF solution for Macs and Windows, including its chief tools for signing, annotating, converting, editing and extracting PDF files.
How we determined which invoice Software Is Best
To ascertain the best invoice software for small businesses we looked at over ten popular choices offering invoicing features and services. The final brands we stuck with was based largely on the cost of the software and whether they contained additional features such as ease of creating, tailor-made professional invoice templates and online accessibility without any software installation needed to invoice.
Factors also considered include ease of setting up recurring payments, invoice payment online by customers and reminders for invoices due or late to customers as well as invoice tracking reportage for due payments. Our evaluation led to five invoicing software from Viewpost, Invoicera, to FreshBooks, Xero and PDFelement. Addition of PDFelement wasn’t solely on the mentioned features but provision of professional free invoicing templates and ability to modify, sign and protect them with an option of accessing the software to access even more features for invoice modification, extraction, form fillings no invoicing software offers.
Best overall small business invoice software
Viewpost:Of all the reviewed invoice software, Viewpost is highly rated due to its cost vis-à-vis features and offerings. Viewpost hardly charges clients any fee for submitting invoices. You can send unlimited number of invoices to all clients without incurring any expense. Nonetheless, Viewpoint will charge about 50 cents from each customer for every payment you receive.
Viewpost is absolutely free for every business owner and includes great features such as invoice customization to add personal business logo, tracking both unpaid and paid invoices and recurring payments setup for clients who’ve no problem releasing payments periodically, such as quarterly, monthly or weekly.
FreshBooks: If your business is service based this invoice software is the best. Tracking expenses and time is so easy and works perfectly well for businesses where billable hours are everything. You’re able to create professional invoices and complete recurring payments set up to avoid manual invoice submission. Also easy to activate automated reminders to remind clients a day or so that payments are due.
Nonetheless, FreshBooks lacks bill management features although you can manage expenses to attach receipts and categorize all product purchases while tracking contractor payments. Also includes time-tracking feature making it easier to review all hours completed by your team. Project tracking from beginning to completion is very easy. FreshBooks plan begin from $15/mo and doesn’t have free version or free trial.
Xero: Online based invoicing software, it offers customizable templates, online payment features and reminders. Xero is touted as the best QuickBooks Online alternative, especially for those with five employees or less. Invoice template features include ability to edit branding themes or adding them, adding personal payment terms, uploading business logo among others.
Automatic invoice reminders are supported, including ability to choose how to send them with overdue and paid invoices clearly indicated. Xero also include security features to block unauthorized changes to invoices with a record maintained showing the major actions on done. Two-step authentication features are easy to enable. Bulk invoices can be sent to customers and ability to make a copy of a previous invoice by updating specific parts.
Invoicera: Covers both small and large businesses. It offers lots of features, such as management of customer invoices and expenses. You can customize invoice with your logo and brand theme, automate reminders for payments and recurring payments. Expense management capability allows you to import expenses from excels or directly into the tool and categorize by vendor, client or project.
Other features include space for receipts and other electronic files storage as well as ability to attach and scan receipts to invoices. Invoicera is a tad expensive even with great features though solid and highly recommended.
PDFelement: The only non-invoice software tool in the list, PDFelement is not an invoicing tool per-se, but a PDF solution for small businesses for Macs and Windows with hundreds of features for signing, annotating, converting and editing documents. In fact, a G2 Crowd verified reviewer intimated that PDFelement’s interface is one reason she likes about the tool and how easy it’s to use and familiarize with in contrast with Microsoft Office. She noted that “it’s as if you’re in Microsoft Office suite’s familiar grounds”. The reviewer also indicated that so far no tool or feature promised in PDFelement is unavailable or unusable and that the software costs 20 percent less than other software such as Adobe Acrobat.
PDFelement makes invoicing easier and free by offering invoice templates in different formats, including PDF, Excel, PSD and Word you can actually sign, print, edit and fill. In addition, PDFelement include great features to create and convert all types of PDF files, including invoices as well as edit, add comments and annotations, sign and secure PDF documents, add backgrounds, watermarks, footers and headers and access to tons of other PDF templates apart from invoice templates. PDF comes with optical character recognition (OCR) allowing you to transform all your invoices and other scanned documents into editable PDFs.
A major strength of PDFelement in invoicing and management of invoices is the inclusion of a tool for invoice extraction, including scanned invoices whenever you want. The free invoice templates include useful instructions on how to maximize on them to cut cost on invoicing software, especially for small business that only need a few invoices at a time.
