You’re a freelancer and need to be able to invoice clients without too much fuss and still have them look professional. Are you looking for a small business invoicing solution . Well here are some of the possible options.
What do you want/need from your invoicing system?
Decide on what you need and then you can see quickly if a solution offers what you want quickly.
- I needed to be able to send PDF’s
- Recurring invoices
- Statements
Summary
- Spreadsheet – only essentials, can be added to, effort to code
- Free on PC – long standing, fully featured, seldom standard, learning curve
- Online free – free is usually limited, can’t always export your data
- Online paid – costs, learning curve, which to use
- Self-hosted – technical know how, more setup, updates
PC or Mac
This is software that is installed to your computer.
Spreadsheet
You can find a number of templates online for setting up invoicing inside of your preferred spreadsheet software. What’s nice is that you control every aspect of what is on your invoice and what the layout looks like, downside is it might take quite some effort to get it there and each invoice is a fairly manual process.
Standalone
Free
I’m still looking
Paid
Paid solutions will offer all the functionality you could imagine needing. You may have to pay to upgrade to a version that has that functionality though.
- Quickbooks
- Sage Pastel
Cloud based
Cloud hosted, make sure you can export your data in case you need to change providers.
Free
There are a few decent truly free solutions with no limitations out there. Other’s either limit you so badly that they become useless. The downside is that it takes time to learn new software and become familiar with it.
Paid
You can see a list of some of the many paid solutions here.
Self hosted
This may not be an option for too many people, as it is a little bit technical, but it is possible to install software to your web server and run it by visiting a specific URL.