Over the years, we’ve used and integrated into businesses the following platforms:
- Freshbooks - Invoice and Accounting Software for Small Businesses | FreshBooks
- InvoiceNinja - Free Open-Source Invoicing, Expenses & Time-Tracking | Invoice Ninja
- QuickBooks - Smarter Business Tools for the World's Hardest Workers
- Wave - Wave Financial: Financial Software for Small Businesses
- NetSuite - Business Software, Business Management Software
- Zoho - Zoho - Cloud Software Suite and SaaS Applications for Businesses
- Custom developed invoice platforms
Our Freshbooks Experience:
Early on as a small business, we loved the simplicity to get up and running in Freshbooks for a ready-to-go invoicing tool.
Freshbooks, at the time, had a completely free plan when we first started using them. Additionally, we really liked the simplicity of creating an invoice and sending it directly to my customers and getting paid directly through the platform's integration with my bank and payment processing. Freshbooks does not have a free tier anymore but does offer a free trial. Go ahead and give it a shot if you're just now looking into integrating a cloud-based invoicing solution for your business.
The only downside that we had with Freshbooks is that we wanted more control over my invoice styles and needed to be able to change certain structures of the interface for service contracts and retainers.
Venturing into a custom solution and then moving back to an established platform:
The lack of customization options in Freshbooks led us to the custom development of a stripped down invoicing application that we self-hosted on AWS servers. This went well for a while until we wanted something easily maintainable. Since then, we've moved to InvoiceNinja and have self-hosted a customized version of the platform and also paid for the cloud-hosted version.
We still use InvoiceNinja today.
As an IT Consulting Firm, we’ve installed, integrated, and customized the aforementioned tools for businesses. All of the tools work well, and ultimately do the job that we need them to do…which is invoice our clients.