As a trusted business advisor for clients all over Calgary I see a lot of them struggle with finding the right option for invoicing their own clients.  We went through this same issue and sometimes pain almost a year ago trying to find a solution that would make our lives easier.  Most people tend to send out an invoice using a template that they have in Excel or Word, which then they store inside of a shared folder for everybody to access.

This works when you have less than 5 customers but what about as you grow more than 5, maybe 20 , 40 or 100 customers?  You need a tool that will make life easy for you and the product we found that has really changed our lives is Freshbooks.  I love this program because it is a Software-As-a-Service model and it cuts the cost of maintaining all kinds of files.

So what are some key points I love about this product?

• It’s online, I can get to from anywhere as can my staff and most importantly my book keeper.
• I can have unlimited customers for around $30 per month.
• I can pull sales reports as well as tracking accounts receivables.
• It provides automatic emailing to clients to indicate past due accounts.
• Although we don’t do this yet, it can automatically calculate late charges.
• Customers can login to their customer portal at anytime to get their account statement.

There are so many great products out there and we’ve found at Eligeo IT it’s important to take advantage of these tools.  Heck, for about $30 a month I’ve taken care of an issue that used to be quite a pain in the past.