Blinksale - Invoicing Great for Freelancers
Based on a lot of the buzz, I've been anxiously awaiting for Firewheel to open Blinksale to the public. Blinksale allows for web-based creation and management of invoices including reminders and thank-you e-mails. Having been using a combination of Excel and Acrobat, I was intrigued to see what the service had to offer.
It has a clean interface that I found easy to use but also some caveats due to internationalisation (i18n) issues. Being from Ontario, Canada, we actually have two taxes (provincial and federal) that get applied to a sale with one tax sometimes being optional. There's currently no way to break it down in this fashion. Nor can you add additional notes to an invoice.
Josh from Blinksale was prompt in replying to my comments (good sign!) and has indicated that this and other i18n-based features will be added over the coming days and weeks.
You can try it for free, so I highly recommend checking it out.
Conversation
Now if we can only find a way to get them to pay faster.
Oh, so they pay now!?
I am most impressed with the amount of press they managed to get behind this thing. Their pagerank next month is going to be amazing.
I see no download link. From what I can tell, this is a hosted service. Why would I want to store my financials on a third-party site (regardless of its monthly fee)?
I've been using a homebrew Cocoa-based app for the past 3 and a half years, which I threw together in a couple of weeks so that I could automatically create nice PDFs with all the calculations handled automatically. Plan has been to develop it into a sqlite-backed and SOAP-connected app with a web-based client access side, as well, but that hasn't happened yet.
Any Mac users interested in discussing this though are welcome to get in touch. Also, I've heard good things about Studiometry although I've not tried it myself yet.
Ben: Not everyone has the technical know-how or the time to put together their own financial app.
As for whether financial information belongs on a remote server is clearly a decision for each person to make. Why would anyone store their financials in a third-party application like MYOB?
Hosted services offer a number of advantages as anyone hosting their own web site has likely discovered. Global access with little need to concern oneself with server or system requirements outside of having a web browser.
True. I didn't mean to suggest that writing one's own app is a superior undertaking and that those who use hosted tools are fools. I realise there is a place for each. I just mentioned it since it seemed on topic.
Anyway, a web-based app could conceivably be offered for download and install on one's own server (much like the plethora of blogging suites), right? For a sensitive application such as financials, it just seemed to me a more produent approach.
Jonathan, have you looked at Vebio (www.vebio.com)? I'm the founder so naturally biased, but I believe that Vebio offers a better solution. Vebio uses a PDF for the final invoice, a format that is more professional and better suited for the structured requirements of invoicing (as a former CFO I do have a foundation for this belief). Vebio also offers recurring invoice capabilities. Happy to get your thoughts on our service.
I like to submit Time59 (http://www.time59.com) for consideration. It combines timekeeping and invoicing (it e-mails PDF invoices).