Making Professional Invoices in a Snap With Invoicera

Would you like to streamline invoicing and billing in your company? Many invoicing webapps are designed for individuals and freelancers and work best for one-off invoicing. Today we’re going to look at a webapp to help manage billing for larger ventures with regular billing and multiple products and services.

Invoicera is a full featured invoicing webapp that includes a ton of features to help you manage invoicing and billing better. With support for multiple currencies, payment gateways, additional staff, saved products and services and more, you’ll have all the tools you need to invoice your clients and get paid. Let’s dig in and see what it has to offer.

Getting Started

One of the best things about webapps is that they’re generally simple to use, and Invoicera is no exception. Select from one of the 4 plans ranging from free to $49.95 per month, depending on your needs. All accounts include unlimited invoices and SSL encryption security, but different number of clients, staff, payment gateways, and more.

Then, enter your business information to create your account and select a unique business URL for your company’s Invoicera account. You can always change your contact name, email, and password later, but be sure to select a login URL you can stick with as you cannot change this without canceling your account.

Once your account’s created, you’ll be ready to login and start streamlining your business’ invoicing. The first time you login, you’ll need to select your regional preferences so Invoicera will always create invoices that look correct for your region. Again, you can always change this later if you need.

Using Invoicera

Now you’re ready to get started making invoices. You can select a quick link right from the front page and immediately make a new invoice, estimate, and more.

However, if you’re not in a rush, you’ll get the best use out of Invoicera if you take the time to add all of your company’s info. You can enter products and services your company offers, save your existing projects and clients, add other company staff to the app, and more. You’ll notice all of these in the handy top menu throughout the app. Once you’ve added these, you’ll be making invoices in seconds. Let’s look at some of the major features Invoicera offers.

Items

Creating invoices will be much quicker once you’ve added your most common items you sale. You can add either products or services your company offers and then view your list of added items quickly later.

Products and services both let you name the item, add the price, tax, and a description of the item. There’s no option for photos or other content, but it does cover the basics of what you’ll usually need in an invoice. One very nice feature is that you can immediately enter another item by pressing the Save and Add Another button after adding an item. This saves you several clicks, and lets you build your inventory list in minutes. Alternately, you can import an .xls formatted spreadsheet with your products and services to save time.

Once you’ve added all of your services or products, you can easily see all of them from the Manage page. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can search through all of the items you’ve added. Alternately, clear up the clutter by archiving items you don’t currently offer.

Clients

While products and services can be simple to classify, clients can be more difficult and need more info. Invoicera still works great even with complex client entries. You can add addresses, allocate staff, or even add unique fields to your client forms. Then, select the currency the client uses, and enter your own exchange rate or accept the default one.

Alternately, you can import clients from a spreadsheet or your Basecamp account. This makes it a breeze to make invoices for clients, no matter where they are and what info you need to keep up with.

Staff

You won’t need to keep up with invoices on your own. If you’re using a premium Invoicera plan, you can add between 2 and 5 staff additional members to your company account. These each can have their own accounts with individual passwords, permissions, and can even be assigned to work with specific clients. The only thing missing is the ability to add more team members; this app would definitely be very useful for teams with more than 6 team members, but currently that’s the limit.

Creating Invoices

Invoicera includes many more options, but the main feature is getting all of your data into easy to produce, nicely designed invoices. Simply select a client name, choose from products or services you’ve added, enter the quantity or length of time for a service, and your invoice will be ready to mail out in seconds.

From the bottom, you can add late fees, terms and conditions, notes, and choose a template. You can also schedule an invoice for a future date and time. Press Preview when you’re ready to create your invoice.

Once you’re finished, you can preview your invoice and print or send it directly from the app. If you don’t like how it looks, feel free to change it to suite your business. Then, you can print, email, or save the invoice as PDF.

Now you’ll be able to keep up with the invoices that are outstanding and those that have been paid directly from your dashboard.

Design and Usability

Invoicera is fairly well designed and each section only takes a few clicks to accomplish a task. The app is laid out in a very logical manner, so anyone used to using online forms should easily be able to get up to speed quickly. It sports a clean, sparse interface that doesn’t stand out, but just lets you do what you need and get back to work.

The only thing we disliked was the orange color scheme, which seems to clash with the otherwise clean interface. We would have appreciated a way to change the theme colors, but the app offers little on the range of customization.

We did appreciate the design touches in the included invoice templates. Many invoicing webapps only include one or two templates, but Invoicera includes five nice designs, each with five color schemes, and also lets you design your own template. This lets your company’s invoices look consistent with your company’s image.

Support

One of Invoicera’s best features is its integrated support. You’ll notice a Live Chat link above the menu throughout the app; click it, and seconds later you’ll be chatting with one of their helpful staff. We had several questions during the review, and they were prompt and helpful each time. This is a great advantage over other webapps that usually rely on email or forum based support.

The app also gets regular updates, but you won’t have to stay up to date with the company blog to know about them. Whenever a new update is added to Invoicera, you’ll see a Latest Updates overview the next time you login. This helps keep you updated on any new features you can take advantage of and is a very nice touch.

Conclusion

Invoicera is a very full-featured invoicing webapp that makes it easy to manage every aspect of your company’s billing and payments. From managing clients to keeping track of the rates you charge for a service, it lets you keep tabs on everything and then turn the data into invoices in only a couple clicks.

While Invoicera takes more setup than many other invoicing webapps, it pays off for this trouble by letting you keep track of more things from one app. The only major problem we noticed was the limited support for multiple employees. With customizable invoice templates and a simple interface, it’s easy for anyone to use. Give it a shot and see if it can help you keep track of your invoices better!