Easy small business startup billing for free

There are lots of great invoicing and billing online tools out there.  Some of them are free, most are for a monthly sum.  For people starting a business today and just want to send out a handful of invoices a month there might be is a better way.

Easy billing is a fast and free way to create an invoice right now. Today.

There is no need to signup, nor create an account, hand over any credit card details or anything else.

The idea is that a freelancer, entrepreneur, single founder, business owner, consultant <insert anyone else here who needs to invoice> can just load up the page in there browser, add the amount, the address and click print.  Stick it in an envelope and mail.  Or, export to pdf and email. Invoicing in minutes!

Why is this awesome?

1. It’s fast (takes 3 minutes if you can type quickly…)
2. It works
3. You can use any currency $ ¥ £ ₨ – enter it yourself manually
4. It prints and displays Japanese characters correctly and likely others too as it’s in standard UTF-8 coding format**
5. If you’re running a decent browser like Firefox the invoice will save in the browser’s cache and upon reload present the last sent invoice. Handy to avoid having to keep typing in your address
6. You can upload your logo
7. There’s lots of room at the bottom of the invoice to add your terms, payment details, thank you notes, reasons to love you and work with you again
8. It’s free to use
9. No login required
10. Exports pdf (have to use “print to pdf”. Macs have this feature built in and it prints great looking invoices. For Pcs, you need a print to pdf plugin installed.  Try dopdf if you don’t have one installed under “file”, “print” and “print to pdf” or “export to pdf”.
11. You can play with it from your iPhone or Android smartphone – haven’t sent an invoice this way before but it could be done on the road
12. You can access invoicing from any computer anywhere with any computer or any browser.  *Scenario* You go to a client’s office and forget to bring your invoice. Jump on a computer and quickly type one up before the meeting and print. Blushes saved and you can get paid.

**This was the main gripe and reason for setting this up.  A lot of the other *cough* invoicing apps printed out Japanese characters as question marks and other unreadable dingbat characters.  It was just unusable and so frustrating.  So, for anyone wanted to print in other languages with other characters, this should work for you.

Very easy to use

Easy small business startup billing - intuitive to edit

It’s very intuitive to use.  Just hover over the area you would like to edit and the editable area goes green. Click and type.

The calculations are done automatically and you can add or delete items by clicking on the plus (+) and minus (-) icons.

The currency is also editable along with the due date, invoice number and today’s date. It’s also possible to add deductions for things like discounts or if a deposit has already been paid on a previous invoice and this is just to address the balance remaining on a client’s account.

More features?

It pretty much does what I want it to do at the moment. Fast, easy and straight forward billing.  Sure, there’s a lot of things it doesn’t do, but it doesn’t need to.  It works really well the way it is and will help a lot of people (and that’s the idea).

For latteperday customers, they get a different more purpose built invoicing app.  It will be able to handle taxes, have real export to pdf built in, allow for saving invoices, create and store client address details, record payments made and received, add project management files, get email notifications, share files with clients, chat on projects with clients, have client areas and so on.  It will be an app for managing client contact details, billing and project management and file sharing all in one.  Great for consultants, architects, interior designers, graphic designers, photographers… and loads of other great professionals.

For the other people who want to sell widgets and items through an online store (e commerce) they’ll have a shopping cart feature built right into their site.  For them, customers will come to their site, add to basket and checkout. The site will take the payment, add shipping, track product inventory and allow users to search, find, fulfil, cancel and refund orders all from a simple orders screen.

What should I do now?

Go and send your first invoice using easy billing. Be sure to come back here and comment on your experience, if it makes your professional life any easier and any other feedback you’d love to share.

Happy billing!