When it comes to online invoicing applications for small business, the competition is anything but stagnant. From Blinksale and Fresh Books to Side Job Track and more robust solutions like Billing Orchard, there is no shortage of selection. By no means have I rigorously tested or evaluated all of these solutions, but since I’ve been using Blinksale for a few months now, I thought I’d let you in on my first impressions.
INTERFACE
Overall the Blinksale crew did an outstanding job with the design and layout. Everything is very intuitive and feels quite natural almost immediately. Though I originally thought the ‘My First Sony’ color scheme would bother me, I found it actually really helped break the interface into recognizable chunks better than some of the other solutions.
FEATURES
I won’t waste too much breath here since pretty much all of these features are fleshed out on the Blinksale site, but for those who need a quick overview, here are some highlights of features available in Blinksale (most of which have been pilfered from the site):
Dashboard
- Quickly, easily create an invoice.
- Get an overview of all your most recent invoices. Click on any of them to see the invoice in detail.
- See recurring templates processing in the next week
Create Invoices
- Freely mix service, time and product line items
- Choose from over 150 world currencies
- Automatically calculate tax and assess late fees
Browse Invoices
- Easily sort through Open, Closed and Past Due invoices
- See at a glance which invoices have been sent
- Tag invoices with key words in order to quickly find them later
- See Amount Paid, Amount Due and Invoice Total for any selection of invoices
Payments & Follow Up
- Easily send out reminders and thank-you notes
- Keep a record of payments received
- Talk with your clients right in the invoice itself
Recurring Invoices
- Easily build new invoice schedules and apply them to multiple clients
- Automatically invoice weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly
- Plan ahead with estimated monthly and yearly recurring income totals
Purchases
- Easily add your purchases from another Blinksale users
- See how much you’ve paid and how much you owe
People
- Easily create companies and associate multiple people to each company
CAVEATS
Creating invoices is a snap, and though the process didn’t leave me wanting, there are a few areas where I wish they had spent a little more time:
- Ability to edit the ‘client dashboard’ CSS: One of the really nice features of Blinksale is the ability to almost completely modify the look and feel of your invoices — another nice feature is the ‘client-dashboard’, a page that clients can view that outlines all of their open invoices. Unfortunately, unlike the invoice design, there is no way (that I’m aware of) to style this page. An editable CSS file for this page would really help to provide your clients with a seamless experience. Perhaps something to look forward to?
- Ability to Create Multiple ‘Kinds’: Currently there are four ‘kinds’ of line items you can enter: Service, Hours, Days, and Product. For most users this combination will be more than enough, but for a contractor like me who has established different hourly rates for different job types (i.e. Creative Direction, Design, etc.) you will need to manually adjust the hourly rate on each line item. It would be nice if you could add/edit the contents of the ‘kind’ drop-down menu.
- Distribute Multiple Invoices: Many times when I’m subcontracting for a company I will be submitting multiple invoices during any billing period. Currently the only way to distribute multiple invoices is to send each one individually. In my case, this means sometimes clients receive over 10 emails at a time. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just ‘publish’ the invoices, and notify my client to check their ‘invoice dashboard’?
- Tags: Over the course of a year I send a fair number of invoices, so the ability to ‘tag’ your invoices is one of the options I value most… If I’m hunting for an invoice it sure makes things a lot quicker. I do have one issue however - When you enter multiple tags they are supposed to be separated using spaces, for some reason I can’t help using commas (at least sometimes). It would be nice if the application simply stripped them out, then again it would be nice if I was simply able to remember not to use commas!
- Invoice State Icons: Ok… Now I’m just nit-picking… When browsing your invoices there are three different invoice states: Open, Closed, and Past Due. It would be nice if each state had a unique icon to represent it - just to differentiate them at a glance, currently the ‘Closed’ and ‘Past Due’ states share an icon.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Quick to set up, quick to invoice, and easy to manage, I’ve been pretty happy with Blinksale (as have my clients). Since I used to create my invoices by hand in InDesign, being able to see, at a glance, how many invoices I have open and past due is also pretty handy. So for a guy who would much rather be doing almost anything other than managing his invoices I wouldn’t hesitate recommending this to others.
