Many small businesses and freelancers will swear by their trusted spreadsheet to create invoices and either print them each time or send them by email as a .pdf. While such simplicity is hard to beat, added complexity rears its ugly head further down the line when you need to find a single invoice out of hundreds of others or when you need to keep track of part-payments or easily understand a particular client history.
Invoice Journal is a free web application that tries to make the process of invoicing as easy and as accessible as possible. Invoices are created electronically and your clients are sent emails containing a link to their invoice for printing or saving in .PDF.
Although relatively new to this increasingly popular market, we found Invoice Journal to be one of the better free services we tried. For a start, Invoice Journal does not have a paid-version so it will not try and entice you to upgrade by limiting your features. The most common limitation is the restriction of the number of invoices you can send each month. Invoice Journal allows you to send as many invoices as you like to an unlimited number of clients, with an impressively long list of currencies at your disposal.
The sign-up process is painless, and the interface is simple and intuitive, so most users will not need long to get up and running. Creating new clients, companies, products and of course invoices after that is a breeze and they all become quickly search-able for future reference. To enhance your searches you can also add custom tags to each invoice so that you can get an overall view of items from a particular class. Overdue invoices can also be listed giving you an immediate picture of who you still need to chase. The finished result looks clean and professional, but those who are especially image conscious can also use their own custom made templates.
How our test invoice turned out.
At present you can include your PayPal account details which will be linked from the invoice, although we would like to see other services such as World Pay or Google Checkout added too (although you can still just request payment by cheque or cash) A multi-user account would also be a convenient tool for businesses who employ more than one person to do the invoicing.
As a web application it has the advantage of portability and access from anywhere but as usual it is hindered by its reliance on an internet connection. At present there is no export or backup function to allow you to bring your data offline.
These shortcomings might be forgiven in view of the fact that this service is still in beta and by the looks of things there is still more (including a reports function) to come. For a simple yet effective way to manage your invoices Invoice Journal is certainly an excellent tool for the price.
http://www.invoicejournal.com/
