Best Tools for Invoicing, Accepting Payments, Sending Receipts

[BWrightTLM]

Hey All!

I recently started my business about 1.5 years ago and am loving it, doing well, and learning new things every day! I am very curious what others in the industry use for proposals, invoicing, accepting payments and sending receipts. What we are doing now seems like a lot of trouble and we are using different platforms for almost all of it.

Since starting, my goal has been to use as little paper as possible, so I do almost everything over the computer.

1. We send out proposals using Quoteroller and that has been very useful because clients can click to the proposal from their email and they can also accept proposals through that link.
2. We invoice clients from Quickbooks Online (QBO) and can have those sent directly to clients' email inbox.
3. We have to manually create a payment link through one of Bluefin's payment platforms. We can send this link through email or add it to the proposal email sent from Quoteroller.
4. After they accept proposals (hopefully!), and make payment, we have to go back into QBO and "receive payment" and this does not send out a receipt to the client. Maybe someone knows a way to fix it to where it does send an automatic receipt when we "receive payment?"
5. If client requests a receipt, we must go into QBO and generate a "sales receipt."

So, now that you know our process, are we making ourself work too much? Is there a more simple approach?

[warcom]

We have been using http://www.getharvest.com/ for the last few years.

It's decent, but I think we'll move away from it shortly as we no longer really use time tracking.

I'll be looking at something that integrates into Xero, or if Xero does recurring invoices, I'll just use that.

[Chris661]

If client requests a receipt, we must go into QBO and generate a "sales receipt."

Not sure why you would need to create a sales receipt since you have already created an invoice. Once you "receive payment" the invoice will be marked as "Paid" by QB and you can simply email that to the client.

Intuit does have a payment link for online payments as well. Not sure if it works with QBO but does with premiere. When you send the invoice the link is included. You might want to check out the QB support forums for more info.

Good luck!

[LesleyPaone]

I have since moved to Freshbooks, because I wanted a light weight billing system, but I did use a pretty powerful one once. What I used was WHMCS, it is what web hosts use. It has a ton of features and it is all hosted on your server. You can set it up with say a Namecheap api and offer domain registrations through your billing too. Since I am a developer more than an SEO guy, I recommended and developed a site for a client that shudders sells alexa ranking increases. I talked them into using that and they love it. It has a very large payment gateway support, it can suspend accounts, charge late fees, and a whole host of other things. It might be something to look into.

One I would not recommend is box billing. I tried it for like a week, it double charged every single client.

[SEO5Team]

Hi Ben,

Based on the volume of transactions, you might want to consider FreshBooks. Although not as comprehensive an accounting solution as QBO, it is very focused on invoicing and payment and is an ideal solution for small agencies/businesses providing services. I've provided a link to their features list below:

Fresh Books Feature List

Cheers,

SEO5