Looking for advice from folks who invoice. What do you use? Quickbooks Online? Do you like it?

I've been using Freshbooks for 7 freaking years, and today I learned that they'll be raising my plan from an already absurd $30/month to $50/month. $360/year is already hard to swallow, but $600/year is obscene for what I'm getting. I don't use it for anything other than invoicing. No payroll, inventory, time tracking, not even any kind of accounting.

Quickbooks Online looks like it'll do everything I'm doing now for $10/month. I'm just trying to see if I'm missing something. Anyone out there have experience with it?

I've not used QuickBooks, so if you are committed to using a pre-packaged solution for your invoicing, this answer won't be helpful to you.

But, it strikes me that it would not be too difficult to create a simple invoicing system in Excel that did rudimentary accounting along with printing the invoices.

Of course, I am an Excel geek thoroughly trapped in the "If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" paradigm, and would no doubt enjoy the challenge of setting up such a system a lot more than you might. Unless you really enjoy tinkering and expanding your Excel knowledge, $10 a month would be your better option.

tanstaafl.

I suspect Matt is invoicing a group of people every month, so an automated service would be good.

If not, then yeah, Excel or an old copy of Quickbooks would be what I'd do.

Freshbooks does give me some features that Excel files wouldn't.

-I don't want to organize a bunch of Excel files
-mobile app lets me send an invoice on-site
-online payments
-client history
-the ability to see if a client has viewed my invoice yet
-send payment receipts with a couple button clicks

There are others, but basically the idea of sending out a bunch of Excel files sounds like a nightmare to me. I have a large number of small amounts that I invoice for, so I'd be sending out dozens of Excel files every month.

Only a small number of the invoices are automated, but those are pretty important to have. I have customers who are auto-billed every month to a credit card on file. Certainly can't do that with Excel.

(no shade on Excel, which I actually like quite a bit)

I use Quickbooks (manufacturer's edition, from 2008, accounting hasn't changed in 3,000 years or more, I don't see the need to ever "upgrade"...) and from the constant barrage of advertising Intuit sends me, it seems the online version will do all that you want.

Lol I know what you mean. Usually the only reason that ANY of my clients need to upgrade either Quicken or Quickbooks is when they get a new computer. I recently dragged a customer off of their Windows XP machine and Quicken 2004

Check out Expensify. They do invoices. I've only used them for expenses, but it might be the ticket for ya.

Maybe a bit of a late response...

Square has invoicing features... I haven't really dug into it though. And as far as I know, you only pay when someone pays via credit card.

I was actually a beta tester for their invoicing service. At that point it was laughable from such a big company. Absolutely terrible. I looked at it recently and it's really not much better.

I actually forgot about this thread. A friend of mine let me know about Wave. It's a free service and very slick. A good UI on the web and in the app. I've been really happy with it and have closed down my Freshbooks account.

So how do they make money?

Same way Square does. They know a large portion of payments are going to be made via credit cards because fewer people mail checks these days. They take their portion of the fees (which are the same as Square's). I guess they're banking on this being enough to support the service and keep everything running and make a decent profit. I guess we'll see. In the end, it wasn't as painful as I thought to move to a new service so if this one goes under I'll just use a different one. No big deal.

I haven't looked to see if they have any add-on features. I get the sense that they're attempting to expand to payroll and other stuff like Freshbooks did but I don't need any of that.

I had to switch to Wave from FreshBooks as well. I'm liking the features overall. The only downfall I have found so far is that there are no variables for the recurring invoices. i.e. if you are entering service dates in the form of now until next month you can't specify {month 01 2019} - {month+1 01 2019}

Yeah, I haven't done much with the recurring invoices aside from setting up the ones I had before, and mine are pretty basic.

I'm still liking Wave a good amount, though I wish there was a way to go right into the invoices rather than go to some landing page first. I worry that they're doing what Freshbooks was doing and expanding into a bookkeeping service which made Freshbooks a bit bloated and cluttered.

For what it's worth, the Wave Invoice app on iOS does go right to the invoices!

Very true!