Acuinvoice review
Acuinvoice
Unfortunately, Acuinvoice was pretty easy to eliminate from my shortlist:
- No expense management - Acuinvoice is all about sending out estimates (quotes) and invoices and doesn’t even pretend to be a full QuickBooks alternative. By selecting Acuinvoice, I’d still have to use another application to do basic book-keeping.
- US payment gateways- Accuinvoice supports PayPal, Authorize.net, 2Checkout, Amazon.com and Google checkout. Even though some of these operate in the UK, none of them offer subscription billing. In the case of Google Checkout, the only supported billing currencies are USD and GBP (we need Euros).
- Limited import & export- Acuinvoice currently only supports import and export from Blinksale – I guess that’s their target market – wooing clients away from that online service? Either way, I didn’t see enough flexibility there to make it of any use to us.
- Strange navigation- I got a bit confused by the split level top-nav and the context-sensitive side nav. It took some getting used-to and I was never really sure where to look for what. Not a biggie in itself. If the product had been a better overall fit for us, I’d have persevered and gotten around it.
- No PDF invoice – I couldn’t see a way to email an invoice to a client as a PDF attachment. As more and more email gets dumped in the SPAM bin – particularly HTML formatted email – this could prove to be a serious oversight.
Conclusions
Scoring an overall 74% match against our requirements, I imagined that Acuinvoice would be a better fit. It’s not that the application is bad – just that, for our particular needs, there are better ones out there.
Next step: A review of Blinksale
Spread the word
24. March 2009 at 5:16 pm :
Acuinvoice is now Smart Invoice. From their recent product announcement:
User Interface
The first thing that you will notice is the new user interface. In addition to a complete redesign, we have added a dashboard that displays a snapshot of your business (A/R, billable work, and billable expenses), and which provides streamlined access to many of Smart Invoice’s core features. From this screen you can quickly create a new invoice, client, or project and can view recent activity and notifications related to your invoices.
Time Tracking
Perhaps the most requested feature was the ability to track time. Smart Invoice now includes a simple time tracking interface that allows you to specify a client, project, and task, and log hours directly into your Smart Invoice account. The interface allows you to easily generate invoices based on time you have logged, and it sorts these items based on whether or not they have been billed. To make time tracking easier, we will soon be releasing a Mac Time Tracking Widget, as well as a time tracking utility for mobile devices.
Expense Tracking
Smart Invoice now features a simple expense tracking utility that allows you to log expenses against client projects, and to track your Company’s internal (i.e. unbillable) expenses. When you go to invoice a client who has billable expenses recorded, Smart Invoice will automatically remind you to include those expenses in the invoice. Note that the aforementioned widget will also allow you to record expenses from the Mac desktop.
Projects & Tasks
Smart Invoice introduces the concepts of projects and tasks. You can now track your work based on these inputs, and automatically generate invoices based on time you have logged against projects.
PDF Invoices
We have added PDF invoices to all paid accounts. When your clients view an invoice, they will be able to download a PDF for their records.
Automatic Past Due Notifications
Smart Invoice now features the ability to automatically send notification of past due invoices. To enable this feature visit Settings | Email Templates | Automated Payment Reminders. Enable each notification you wish to send, update the text as appropriate, and save your settings.
Business Identification Numbers
Several users (particularly users outside of the US) requested that we add the ability to display a business identification numbers on invoices. You can now add this by clicking Settings | Edit Account. You will see two fields: “Business ID Type” (e.g. VAT Number or ABN) and “Business ID” (the actual number). These will automatically show up in the address block of your invoices.
vCard Import
Smart Invoice now supports the import of both single and multi-contact vCards. Visit Clients | Import From vCard to perform a bulk import of clients.
Custom Item Types
We received frequent requests for the ability to add custom item types to invoices, and this has been integrated into Smart Invoice. To add custom item types, you can either click “+” in the invoice creation interface or click Settings | Customization to define custom item types.
Statements | Client Statement and click the send button.
Smart Invoice now makes it easy to send clients a statement, which includes all outstanding invoices. To send a statement, navigate to Clients |
Sales Tax
The old AcuInvoice sales tax system was flexible, but cumbersome. Smart Invoice has adopted for the the “less is more” approach. The sales tax system allows you to specify the name of the tax and a percentage; you simply select the tax from a pulldown menu to apply the tax to the relevant items. You can define taxes in Settings | Sales Tax, or create them on the fly through the invoice creation interface.
Recurring Invoices
We have significantly improved the recurring invoices feature. Previously, recurring templates required that you specify line items, a billing interval, and a start date. The problem with this system was that you could end up having several different templates for essentially the same service (e.g. web hosting starting on January 1, web hosting starting on January 2). We have therefore modified the recurring invoices feature so that a template specifies only line items and an invoicing frequency. After creating this template, you then associate specific clients, each of whom have their own start date.