I’ve been looking for a new billing system for thing.net. We want something we can work with from anywhere, and minimizes the work it takes to get invoices to our customers, and tracking our billable items.
I recently choosing clientexec as a billing tool since it had some support for provisioning. It isn’t working out so well. The UI completely confuses my book keeper, it doesn’t support partial payments to invoices, doesn’t do time tracking, I have to maintain it myself, there are frequent upgrades and bugs, and I’m not really utilizing the provisioning interface. I think client exec isn’t a bad option for an automated hosting shop built around what client exec provides. I don’t think its really mature enough to be a released product in many ways. (Being an OS developer myself I would be willing to fix the things I think are broken, but the cost of their developers license is prohibitive. I can’t believe they would charge someone to improve a product they sell.)
With my little rant out of the way, I’ve been checking out other billing options. My requirements are time tracking, multiuser access, automated credit card billing, recurring billing, and some need to make the branding for the client UI look like my own.
I’ve looked at hosted services primarily this around. I don’t want to maintain infrastructure for billing. We develop and host websites, we don’t want to waste revenue generating energy on maintaining a billing system.
For hosted services I’ve found, Quickbooks Online Billing Orchard SimplyBill BlinkSale and FreshBooks
Quickbooks Online Quickbooks would be an awesome option for us, we could have a full accounting package. I could have real financial reporting available online anywhere. It would be amazing. I have one Big Problem with it though. My entire staff runs on Linux. We don’t have Internet Explorer. So Quickbooks Online gets a quick no go.
Billing Orchard Billing Orchard seems like a fairly good option for us. It has all the features we want. The price is right. The UI is still a little dense for out book keeper. We also hit the vendor lock-in barrier with Authorize.Net though. We get preferential rates with the merchant account provider we’ve been using for a decade now, and they use Linkpoint. Sorry Billing Orchard. Still a good product, probably the way to go if you’re using AuthorizeNet.
SimplyBill Simply Bill is very promising. It’s all web 2.0 happiness with tagging invoices, and RSS feeds for tracking invoice status. It doesn’t have automatic payment support. So I have to pass.
BlinkSale BlinkSale is a another Web 2.0 billing App. Simple UI. It has a cool payables page which would be better if you could add your own payables, and not just ones you recieve from other BlinkSale users. They also fail in the CC integration category. I have to pass.
FreshBooks The have a clean user interface. All the features I want. It is integrated with a good number of payment gateways. You can upload a logo and choose your color set. They’re more expensive than the other options, but from my initial testing, it is a more mature product. They’ll even mail your invoices for a price.
This is kind of a quick and dirty analysis without any real metrics besides a feature comparison. The only mature players I found were Quickbooks Online, Orchard Billing, and FreshBooks. FreshBooks came across with the best UI and least limitations for payment methods. I have high hopes for BlinkSale and SimplyBill. They seem like they will mature well.