Online billing applications
What do we need from an online billing application? What are our mandatory and optional requirements?
Going online
My main priority is to manage invoices and expenses online – not so much because I’ll be freed from being in the office – but so that I can truly integrate the billing process into my customer management systems. If I can do that, I can completely automate most of my run-of-the-mill accounting and billing tasks – and that means freeing up my accounts people for more productive work – like chasing invoices and dealing with clients.
As an added bonus, if the online billing application already has some payment processor gateways integrated, then I can wean my business away from the WorldPay cash-starvation model, save my clients the ordeal of using their archaic payment processing forms – and save money on each transaction. That’s the hope anyhow.
Options
There are plenty of online payment processing and invoicing options – fewer if you’re looking for one with a European or UK flavour. Even so, I easily found over 30 online invoicing applications to evaluate.
After looking at the third or fourth one, I realised I was going to get confused pretty quickly and drew up a list of mandatory and nice-to-have requirements and scored each solution with a simple yes/no against each requirement. Fortunately, this wiped out most of the contenders and left me with a short-list of five or six real possibilities.
For each option, I signed up for a free account, played with the settings, asked their support people questions and generally tried to figure out if I could achieve what I wanted.
Mandatory requirements
- 100% online- Nothing to download, no special plug ins. I should be able to access my billing system from an internet café anywhere in the world.
- API – I must be able to exchange information with the billing service via an Application Programming Interface so that I can completely automate the interaction between my Customer Relationship Management system and the credit card processor.
- Secure – Access to the service must be secure via https.
- Backed up – The service must have a documented backup and disaster recovery policy.
- Sales Tax – I must be able to configure local VAT settings.
- Custom Invoice – I must be able to customise the look & feel of invoices that my clients receive.
- Invoice Status – I want to report on invoices paid & outstanding.
- Export – I want to be able to export everything out of the service so that my data is portable (I’m not locked in) and I can control my own data backups.
Nice to have features
- Import - It would be great to be able to import bank balances, client data and invoice data from QuickBooks to the billing application. This would make the transition much smoother.
- EU Credit Card Processing - If the billing system also came with an integrated credit card processing option, it would reduce my need to do custom API programming AND I might be able to solve the WorldPay icky interface problem and save money.
- PDF Invoice – Email sucks as a delivery format but PDF attachments do get displayed consistently. It’d be nice to be able to send invoices to clients as a PDF attachment to emails.
- Recurring billing – If the invoicing system can handle subscription payments then I have more flexibility about whether the merchant account handles the repeat billing (how WorldPay works) or whether I can get more control of the process if the invoicing system instigates the repeat billing process.
- Highrise API- We use 37 Signal’s Highrise system as a CRM and our internal systems use their API to exchange data back and forth. It’s be nice if the invoicing application also had a Highrise API so that each system could share data and reduce the need for our internal systems to do all the updating.
- Expense tracking – Aside from invoicing, we also use QuickBooks for expense and bank account management. It’d be great if the online service could completely replace these functions too.
Next step: Potential online billing applications
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