Small Business, Small Budget: 4 Affordably Free Invoicing Tools
Published on 15 October 13
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You just opened the doors of your catering business, and things are going well. Even if you build up a clientele quickly, though, the first couple of years can still be pretty lean. You know the importance of budgeting, but it's hard to choose corners you can cut and still look professional.
One area of your business that can be whittled down to fit into a strained budget is invoicing. Save the costs of bookkeeping, professional printers and postage with free invoicing tools. They're the budget-friendly solution to putting a professional face on the invoices you send to clients. Most are available online, meaning you can create and review invoices anywhere you have access to the Internet and a computer or smartphone.Intuit Billing Manager
Intuit's Billing Manager provides invoice templates that you can customize with your company's logo. You can also tailor the payment options. Use a small business credit card, cash or check to handle monthly billing. If you have a list of basic products and services you offer, you can create a menu in your Billing Manager account so that you don't have to manually enter the same descriptions and pricing over and over. Send your completed invoices via email, or print them out and send them through snail mail.
FreshBooks
FreshBooks is a fresh way for a small business on a budget to create professional-looking invoices. If you have limited clientele and no staff, you're in luck. FreshBooks is free. There are also upgraded, pay options ranging from $19.95 to $39.95 per month if you want more out of your Freshbooks account such as unlimited invoicing, accommodating more than three clients and if you have staff that needs to access your account. Like many of their contemporaries, FreshBooks is accessed online, where you create and send invoices using FreshBooks templates. Create a customer database within your account along with a product menu to make creating invoices lightning-quick. Invoice your clients via email, or print them out for an old-fashioned mailing.
PayPal
If your clients prefer to pay through PayPal, it makes sense to take advantage of the free invoice templates. You can customize PayPal invoices by uploading your logo. Fill in your customer's PayPal email address and the items you're billing for along with the price. PayPal gives you the option of adding any customer to your address book, and you can save details of frequently invoiced items, too. You can discount the invoice by filling in the percentage you're taking off. You can also add applicable shipping and handling fees and even charge sales tax. Invoicing through PayPal makes it easy for your customers to pay you with just a few clicks of the mouse, and you and the customer will get reminders of unpaid invoices.
Invoice Journal
Some invoicing tools are available through free or paid programs, others are only available as a free tool. Invoice Journal is the latter, but it's still quite a useable and flexible option. Cohere reports that Invoice Journal has custom templates and doesn't restrict how many clients or invoices you can have. If your clients are spread out all over the globe, Invoice Journal handily works with multiple currencies. You can send invoices through email and the software records payments and allows you to include discounts and sales tax, too.
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Nice Read ! I would like to suggest one more useful invoicing tool which I prefer for my business i.e. Invoicera. It allows you to generate unlimited invoices for free. Besides that, Invoicera helps you with features like auto billing, subscription billing, auto reminders, expense and time tracking and reporting. You may add this tool to your list as it would help lot of businesses. http://www.invoicera.com/small-businesses.html
Replicon could be another great choice of tool to manage the expenses, billing and invoicing. The tool is capable to manage the monetary cash flow transaction and process the time and tasks as well with absolute accuracy.
Intuit's Quickbooks is far more easier to integrate into any e-commerce platform. They product offerings help small time business owners to reduce their costs.