Web Based Invoicing - Blinksale and FreshBooks

After serving customers well, the next most important thing to your business is to actually get paid. That's where Blinksale and FreshBooks can help your small business with billing through their web based invoicing systems.

Blinksale
Blinksale helps you organize and streamline your invoicing. Blinksale users can create an invoice and subsequently send it via e-mail, all from the comfort of a web browser.

Other features include sending clients reminders, thank you's, setup recurring payments, and also having Blinksale assess late fees, if necessary. Blinksale also offers PayPal as a payment gateway after linking a PayPal account to the Blinksale account. After linking the PayPal account, users can check an "include PayPal link" on the invoice before it is sent out. That's incredibly useful in providing an easy way for clients to pay the invoice.

Since Blinksale is a subscription based service, they don't take "a piece of the pie." Leave that part up to PayPal.

Learn more about Blinksale.

FreshBooks
FreshBooks does more than just invoicing. It's really a complete Project Management tool, offering invoicing, timesheet tracking, document sharing, a support ticketing system, as well as reporting on all of those.

My instinct is that FreshBooks probably started along the lines of Blinksale but evolved because many of those other tasks (i.e., timesheet tracking and support) tie into billing. For example, it's easy to create an invoice for Company X if you see how much time was dedicated to it.

Concluding Thought
In terms of pricing, FreshBooks allows unlimited invoices to be sent even with their free service. Since Blinksale only does invoicing, that's obviously not the case (you can send three invoices per month via the free service).

On the invoicing side of things, I like the way Blinksale actually includes the invoice in the e-mail versus how FreshBooks just places a link to it. That being said, I did have a problem with the layout of my Blinksale invoice in my hosted Gmail account - but Blinksale also recognized that and directed me to the online invoice page.

If you just want a simple online invoicing tool, Blinksale is the way to go. FreshBooks has a lot of promise in the PM space though and their upcoming feature to send invoices through ground mail (and more on that here) may make it worthwhile to use them, even if you're just looking for invoicing only.

Comments

[Fresh Mike]

Ken,

Thanks for posting about online invoicing...I think both of our companies are up to some great things.

On the "more that just invoicing theme", we (at FreshBooks) are very excited about the ground mail feature. It's going to help a lot of businesses that are struggling to get their billing processes online. But the reason for my comment is I wanted to direct you to some work we are doing with timesheets that I am really excited about. Basically, tracking time can be a real pain for freelancers when they need to track time for various contracts they are working on. In the following link I talk more about the problems that arise when you do contract work and how we are going to be tackling them in the coming months:

http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2006/06/02/software-should-be-social-because-no-one-works-alone/

[Sanjay Kumar]

Good thoughts on these two, but they're not the only game in town. Given the applications in-market today, we definitely see an opportunity in this space. Keep an eye on us over the next month or so...

http://www.simplifythis.com

[chris]

Another player is www.time59.com

[Steve]

InLattice www.inlattice.com is another service in this area. It is also integrated well with QuickBooks. Subscribers can either use web based invoicing option or use invoices created in QuickBooks. It is integrated with PayPal, Google Checkout payment gateways.

[Raymond Selda]

Thank you for writing this review. Greatly appreciated.

[Stuart]

Hey Ken, I wrote this blog that takes a look at Freshbooks, Harvest and Blinksale and was just featured on WebWorkerDaily. I used Freshbooks, Harvest and Blinksale over a 3 year period and decided to document the process. Just thought it might be helpful for your readers to have another resource to refer to on the topic.

[Stuart]

The link is http://simplestation.com/locomotion/freshbooks-harvest-blinksale/