Conclusions & next steps

In terms of online billing applications, KashFlow came the closest to satisfying our requirements. It scored almost perfectly against our mandatory and optional requirements and their support was excellent.

Dual language invoicing

Unfortunately, during the evaluation process, we became aware of one critical must-have requirement – dual language invoicing.

Some other applications gave us greater flexibility than KashFlow regarding invoice templates – but none of them are designed to issue an invoice in two languages.

Back to our own back-office

As a result of this show-stopper, we re-thought our approach completely. What if our own back-office systems actually issued the invoice? They’re already dual-language capable, so adding the invoice generation part might not be too tricky.

After we create the invoice using our own system, we could still use the API of the billing application to enter the invoice into that system automatically – but never send it to the client.

That way, the other good stuff inside the billing application – payments processing, reconciliation and reporting – could work as normal. We’d just be solving the problem of creating the invoice in multiple languages.

Payment gateways

Working on the assumption that this approach could work, I revisited the weak area of most of the online billing applications – the integrated payment gateways. KashFlow was particularly strong in this area, offering three potential gateways we could use. However, after doing a bit more digging, it turns out that not all the integrations offer equal capabilities.

The potential complications with using these gateways caused us to rethink the role of online billing applications completely. By making them the centre of our system, we were limited to their integration and functionality. By moving them to the edge, and making our own back-office systems capable of being at the centre of things, we could achieve all of our goals.

However, we were now contemplating using just one-third of the capabilities of an online billing application – the book-keeping. We’d move invoicing to our own system and we’d talk directly to a payment gateway via its API. We’d talk to the online billing application via its API just to keep the books straight.

This got me wondering whether there wasn’t an open source billing application which we could fit and forget on one of our own servers and use its API to do all the book-keeping stuff. At the same time, I wondered if there wasn’t some middleware available which could help us interface these systems to each other?

Next Step: An evaluation of Open source billing applications

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