I recently started a couple web site projects for a client and needed an invoicing solution. I didn’t put much thought into it at first as I was more focused on the actual projects, then I needed to send an invoice and realized I didn’t have one!
The quick and dirty approach
The first thing did was fire up Open Office Writer and create a simple invoice. Nothing fancy. No logo, no colors or fancy fonts, just a simple table with the work done and cost.
While not the most professional looking invoice, it served its purpose and Open Office has a nice export to PDF for me to send it off to the client. Given that, I started looking for online solutions to my invoicing needs.
Lots of Choices!
A simple Google search revealed that there are quite a few online invoicing solutions with a variety of features and costs. I started looking at a few of them and liked what I saw. Then I came across a post on FreelanceSwitch that has a quick summary of seven online invoicing sites.
A couple such as Blinksale and SimplyBill I had seen already so I focused more on the others. Most of them have the modern ‘Web 2.0′ look and feel as far as colors and layouts. Some also have modern web application features like AJAX functionality, making the application more pleasing to use.
Features
My feature requirements were fairly straightforward. I wanted invoicing (duh), PDF export of an invoice and fairly inexpensive. The PDF requirement was a given in that I wanted to be able to send a document to a client for easy printing and distribution on their end. Unfortunately not all the invoice companies provide this capability and a couple said “just have them print the page to a PDF driver”. Uh, yea. Not everyone is savvy enough to even have a clue as to what that means and web pages don’t always print nicely as it is. PDF export is a must.
The more I looked at the offerings the more features I started to want. I liked the idea of a time tracker even though I don’t normally charge by the hour. I would still like to use it to keep an internal record of my time for each project. This kind of information will help in providing estimates for similar projects in the future.
Customization
Customization is a definite plus. Beyond a simple logo upload, the better solutions allow a lot of control over the look of your invoice. This allows you to really personalize your invoice to your company or brand. A quick thought here would to customize your invoice to match the look and feel of your website. Very handy.
Proposals
A few allow you to write up a proposal to send to a client, and then turn that proposal into an invoice with a simple click or two. May not be helpful to me for most of my work but it couldn’t hurt.
Misc. Features
A few of the offerings have the capability to integrate with Basecamp, which is an online project management and collaboration application, for importing clients. Very handy if you are going to use Basecamp for that functionality.
Cost
Most of the invoicing solutions I found are very reasonably priced, with plans well under $50 a month. Most of the offerings that I found had a plan in the under $20 range that suited me quite well. For the most part cost goes up as project counts go up or by invoices sent, etc.
Most also have a free version or at least a 30 day trial so you can try them out.
Which did I choose?
I haven’t made a final decision yet, but I’m leaning towards Cashboard. It seems to have more features that the others for a comparable or lower cost. They have Basecamp integration, great customization capabilities, a nicely time tracker widget and for my needs would only cost me a whopping $12 a month. Not too shabby.
Whatever your requirements are, you are sure to find a nice solution with the variety of online solutions.
There has been a lot of chatter in the blogging world in the past few weeks about Google penalizing sites that are selling links as a means to generate revenue. Well if you are considering doing this, or even want to advertise via buying links, then there is a new network that can hide your activities much better than other methods.
That network is called TNX.net. They have a beautiful looking interface (click the thumbnail below), and have a different way of allowing you to select which sites you want to advertise on. Instead of the model that Text-Link-Ads uses, TNX.net lets you pick sites based on Yahoo back links, Google PageRank along with the usual categories that you would like. The benefit of this model is that is allows the publishing sites to better hide their site from search engines. The downside is that you can go and visit the site and see if it is appropriate for you or if you even like it.
TNX.net uses a point-based model that is can be a bit confusing, but one interesting thing is that you can sell the points you have accumulated. You can see more details on their site. There is also a special that is being promoted on the Digital Point forums where they will give you a few thousand free points.
I think I’ll give a whirl myself and let you know how it goes. In the mean time, sign up yourself, it’s free.
For while now AuctionAds has been one of the hottest ad networks out there. Now there is WidgetBucks.
WidgetBucks uses a flash-based display mechanism for showing the items in a, well, flashier way. With a simple to use interface (click screen shot below for larger view), you can create ads in a matter of seconds and see what they will look like instantly. It currently supports only five sizes of ads, but they are the five most common sizes being: 300×250, 468×60, 160×600, 728×90 and custom size of 600×330 which is a truly big ad. However that size would be perfect for say the middle of a blog post.
You can choose between 13 different popular categories with sub categories of each. As an alternate you can choose to use the context sensitive approach, where it will try to choose a widget based on your site’s content. One nice feature is that as you mouse over the items in the list, you will see a picture of that item scroll into view so it is more interactive than most other ads without being too intrusive.
If you are using PayPal or Google Checkout for your payment methods, FatFreeCart.com has a simple to use shopping cart setup just for you. It is free to use and doesn’t even require registration, just pasting in their code onto your site, a little configuration and you are off an running.
It will calculate sales tax, discount coupons, inventory as well other features. Give it a look if you need a shopping cart at www.FatFreeCart.com.
Found via AdesBlog.
Now owned by Google as of May, FeedBurner is making their PRO stats and MyBrand services free to users. You still have to go to the control panel and upgrade, but no longer have to pay for said upgrade.
This is a nice feature for those that use FeedBurner’s services (especially bloggers). I wonder how long it will take before Google analytics and FeedBurner stats are integrated?
According to the Search Engine Watch site, the major search engines have worked up and idea to allow autodiscovery of sitemaps. For those not familiar, the sitemap protocol was originally conceived by Google as a means of allowing webmasters to create an XML file that Google uses for determining what URLs to index on a site.
Later, Microsoft and Yahoo joined in the idea and they formed a common sitemap protocol which can be found at sitemaps.org.
The big news however is that by using the robots.txt file, you can tell a search engine what the URL is for your sitemap instead of having to supply it manually to the search engine as previously required. This can be done by using add an entry like: Sitemap: http://mogul.macsimumweb.com/sitemap.xml. Just make sure you have the URL correct and you are good to go.
Adding to their already good collection of free tools, Google has publicly launched their Website Optimizer tool. The purpose of the tool is to let site owners create different content for their pages and using the provided Google API, change those pages on the fly and see how users react to them. You can change text, images or whole sections to see what works best for you and your customers. The tool then provides nice charts and graphs showing the results.
This lets you test completely different versions of a landing page or layout and see which provides the best results. Brian Clark of the Copyblogger has done this type of testing for a few people in his headline remix series. For some sites the results can be measured in sales but with a multivariate tool like Google’s, you can get more measured results.
Like most of Google’s tools, it is easy to use, easy to install and works with AdWords and their Analytics packages.
The NetBusinessBlog The Best FTP Software had a post about the best FTP software. The choice was SmartFTP, which I have to agree is a wonderful free FTP package. However I have recently started using FireFTP which is actually an extension for FireFox. As I have been doing a lot of blog related stuff lately and with PHP stuff in particular, it much easier to switch tabs than to switch apps when going back and forth.
FireFTP made not have a ton of bells and whistles, but when you just need a simple transfer it is a perfect solution.
I came across the blog called The Chief Happiness Officer today authored by Alexander Kjerulf. He definitely fits the entrepreneur mindset and has a lot of good advise.
I’ve only read a few of his posts so far, but when I read this one I knew I could relate to him. He has his first book out which looks to be a good read. I’ll probably get it myself after the first of the year.
While the blog is geared towards workplace happiness and as an entrepreneur you may not have many employees (or any except yourself), Alexander has some good stuff to keep in mind for the day when you do have employees and want them to be happy.
