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Sending invoices and quotes to multiple clients is an everyday task in the life of a web designer. You will fall into hundreds of paid invoice applications while searching for the free one, each ranging from 5$/m to 30$/m and so on. Paid apps can be good for large corporations who earn a lot of money but they are simply a monthly expense for an average freelancer. That’s why we have prepared an article having 5 best free invoicing apps for your business.
Billing Boss is a totally free invoicing application with pretty features. The user can easily keep track of billings and payments. Account at Billing Boss can be integrated with Sage Payment Services, Beanstream, or PayPal. In result, customers can pay your invoice online immediately. User interface of Billing Boss has been adapted in different languages. Further, the mobile version of web interface is also available to interact with application on iPhone or G1.
Billing Boss
During the Sign Up, the user fills up the required information like Name, Address, Logo, and Tax Information of business. The account can also be linked with some merchant services if required.
In next step, you need to create customers, which is simple enough. Then you can make a quote or invoice. I am creating here an invoice which is billing 1stwebdesigner for a guest article. Once you fill the invoice and save it, a preview of invoice will appear. In this preview, you can apply available styles, send or print it, or save as pdf. Below are the screenshots for the above mentioned two steps.
Creating a new client with Billing Boss
A preview of Billing Boss Invoice
Intuit Billing Manager is also a free and intuitive online invoicing application. You can easily create and send invoices. The application gives you a review of what is overdue and what has been paid. The user can send reminders to customers if there is an outstanding payment.
Intuit Billing Manager
After filling login details, the user can create invoice immediately. I would recommend going on settings tab and modifying your details accordingly. You can alter business information like address and logo, default messages attached in outgoing email, payment methods and some other default invoicing parameters.
Intuit Billing Manager Settings
In the left side bar of the application, you can see “My Address Book” which is used to manage your customers. You can add manually or import CSV file of your business contacts at once. Also, there is a section in the sidebar titled as “Products & Services”. In this section, you can add what you are offering to avoid manual entry whenever you create an invoice.
If you create invoices infrequently, above mentioned steps can be skipped. The invoice creation process is straight. You can apply one of the invoice templates available. After filling the information, the invoice can be saved, previewed, printed, or sent by email. In print mode, the invoice can also be saved as pdf.
Intuit Billing Manager Invoice
Another Great and Free invoicing application is invoice journal which lets you create invoices for your clients. After signup, invoice journal give you a unique sub domain which can be used for login to your account. The process is very simple. You can create clients and after that start sending invoices for no fee. The application has a nice and very simple user interface which makes it great to use.
Creating a new client in Invoice Journal
Creating an invoice with Invoice Journal
BambooInvoice is a free and open source application to send and manage professional invoices. One has to install it on its own servers before using it. It is one of my favorite invoicing application as my point of view is that invoicing and your personal finances are sensitive case and you should not leave them to some one else.
Bamboo Invoice: Free and Open Source Invoicing Application
The open source software needs php5 and mysql 4.1 databases to work efficiently. It is build using code igniter and really have great user interface. BabmooInvoice is a very active project and you can also get support if you run into any trouble by accessing its forums here. Give it a try and you will love it.
Bamboo Invoice User Interface
Simple invoices is another free and open source invoicing system which you can use to get money from different clients. Like BambooInvoice, you have to install in on your own server to use. The open source application has been translated in to many languages and some developers have also built extensions for it. You can also email your prepared invoice as pdf. Simple invoices has comprehensive documentation so you can install it easily.
Free Simple invoicing
Have a look at the user interface of simple invoices. It has been enhanced with Ajax and java script.
Simple invioces User interface
We have covered some awesome free web apps that are best alternatives of expensive invoicing apps. Feel free to share your invoicing systems and let us know if we have missed something important.
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Saad Bassi is a 20 years old web developer from Pakistan who loves to create beautiful websites with great user experience. He is co-editor at CrispyTech and 1stWebDesigner and blogs about the next Windows at Windows8Geek. He also loves to make new friends so don't forget to say him a hello on Twitter. Last but not least, make sure that you check out my latest project, Addictive Fonts which focuses on free high quality font downloads.
Friday, February 10th, 2012 17:05
If you do a lot of sub-contracting for only 1 or 2 companies Freshbooks is great (and free). Anything over 3 clients cost which sucks, but if you sub-contract for only a few major guys you can just make a bunch of projects per client and it works out. Been using it for a couple months now, used to use BambooInvoice (which I also think is fine), but Freshbooks has a lot more features. Also allows for payments using Paypal, Google Wallet or even Authorize.net directly with a CC. If you want to go with hosting your own though, I def recommend BambooInvoice.
Friday, November 26th, 2010 05:24
Grabbed a CurdBee Black Friday sale bundle and enjoying the price reductions. Woot! http://curdbee.com/big/
Monday, October 18th, 2010 16:03
Hello,
Actually I think billing boos is far better than the rest because it can acceots payments through pay pal. If you want to pay you can either connect it to other payment gateways. The rest are just invoicing systems.
cheers,
Giorgos
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 07:38
the list is good.. but we need more of open source apps.. that can be hosted… can u do a list of that
Monday, June 7th, 2010 01:45
@Chris W – Thanks for signing up for Billing Boss! Hope it has saved you time, allowing you to concentrate on your core business. Let us know if we can do anything to help! http://twitter.com/billingboss
Liz (from the Billing Boss team)
Monday, June 7th, 2010 01:42
Thanks for the mention! I’m from the Billing Boss team.
We’ve recently launched our mobile payment app, Payment Boss, and we’re super excited about it! It allows users to collect payments while they’re on the road through their mobile phone.
In summary:
- Real time processing, real time confirmation
- Users key in credit card info, customer contact info, and amounts
- Invoices are automatically created when payment is collected, and invoices are emailed to the customer.
- Customer contact information is stored, which can be later exported to other programs. Useful for marketing campaigns, or whenever one needs to reference customer’s contact info on the road.
- Complete integration with Billing Boss. Accountants/bookkeepers/users can track payments accepted through the mobile phone, as all payments and invoices can be tracked through the Billing Boss interface.
Mobile payment solution is at http://www.paymentboss.com
Full Disclosure: This author has been compensated by Sage.
Friday, May 28th, 2010 18:49
Is there such a free program that I can send my client a quote for services, and if they accept it, they click on a button, it automatically generates an invoice and transfers my client to paypal and makes a payment. All my clients are prepay and this would eliminate a lot of emails and time.
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 02:44
Karen I am actually looking for a program like that…I saw your comment and was really hoping that someone responded back. That would be ideal for sure!!
Thursday, April 15th, 2010 08:29
Another vote for Curdbee!
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Hilmy
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 16:51
oh these are good alternatives for me who have been using Excel for the task..thanks.
Pete
Thursday, February 4th, 2010 14:44
I’ll agree with Miles, Invoice Machine is an excellent tool and definately deserves more exposure!
I’ve been using it for about 6 months and have just been astounded with how feature rich and easy to use it is.
Ben
Thursday, February 4th, 2010 19:52
Check out SUBERNOVA http://www.subernova.com, it’s probably the only hosted web app that lets you send invoices and quotes reflecting your own domain name.
Nabeel Akhtar
Friday, February 5th, 2010 01:32
another one is http://www.freshbooks.com
Caru Millami
Friday, February 5th, 2010 11:48
It is a pretty decent list of online invoicing applications available and I must appreciate the effort. But at the same time I found some important and widely used apps did not feature such as http://www.invoicera.com; http;//www.invoicemachine.com amongst many.
Hope to see them in the future!
Cheers :)
Caru
Saad Bassi
Friday, February 5th, 2010 11:50
Already told that we tried to write about the free apps which don’t have a monetization aspect in them.
Matt Fenn
Friday, February 5th, 2010 23:12
Hi Saad, great article! Can I add Moobiz http://www.moobiz.com into the mix? It deals with invoicing and accounting, but what makes it really interesting is that you also get access to a great range of business management apps, including contact management, to-dos, project & file management etc..
It’s not free, with pricing starting at £15/month but there’s no limit on the number of invoices or projects that you can run, and it offers great value!
Jordan Walker
Thursday, February 4th, 2010 17:11
Bamboo Invoice is a great piece of software.