As a small business owner, managing your cash flow while waiting for clients to pay invoices can be a challenge. While invoice financing helps you handle your cash flow gaps and get paid faster, it’s still your responsibility to send invoices and ultimately collect payments from your customers.
With so many invoicing tools available to help you manage your finances, it’s not always easy to decide which platform is best for your business. For this reason, we’ve put together a list of budget-friendly tools to create professional invoices and help you get paid faster. Take a look:
4 Easy Ways to Send Invoices
QuickBooks
Intuit’s QuickBooks is a popular full-scale accounting choice among small business owners. Among a host of other bookkeeping features, QuickBooks offers an easy way to manage and send invoices. QuickBooks touts several different price points and packages. Out of all of the options, QuickBooks Self-Employed is perhaps best-suited to freelancers who want to both create and send invoices. Starting at $4 a month, you can create and send invoices on the go, and if you enable online payments, you can get paid by credit card or bank transfer. QuickBooks Online, on the other hand, is a more immersive option for small businesses. It allows you—or maybe a bookkeeper—to gain access to the platform from any device. Pricing starts at $10 a month, and with QuickBooks online, you can send invoices that accept credit and debit card payments, take payments using free bank transfers, and set up recurring invoices with reminder notices.
FreshBooks
The FreshBooks cloud accounting system is another well-known invoicing tool for small business owners and self-employed freelancers. It offers an all-in-one platform for managing bookkeeping tasks, which includes invoicing and sending late payment reminders. According to FreshBooks, its average customer saves over 16 hours a month by using FreshBooks to eliminate the hassle of creating invoices and collecting payments. Clients can pay invoices directly through FreshBooks using credit cards. Pricing plans starting at $15 a month, plus you’ll pay an extra credit card payment fee per transaction (typically 2.9% plus 30 cents). You can try FreshBooks for free for your first 30 days.
Wave
When it comes to free invoicing, Wave is riding the crest. Creating a Wave account takes less than a minute. You’re then on your way to creating and sending customized invoices using a myriad of available templates. Among the many Wave features: You can use the simple system to send follow-up statements for overdue accounts, issue payment reminders to your clients, and send professional receipts. You can also use the Wave app to send invoices from your phone and accept credit card payments. This option will cost you a typical credit card transaction fee of 2.9% plus 30 cents.
Hiveage
Hiveage, formerly called Curdbee, is similar to Wave, yet it’s not free. The basic Hiveage package starts at $15 a month, although you can give it a free test run for the first 14 days. Hiveage is a bit more comprehensive in its offerings than Wave and may be a better option if you run more than one business or have multiple employees who also use it. Hiveage offers business owners the ability to share invoicing functions among employees or manage invoicing for more than one company from a single account. When it comes to accepting payment on invoices, Hiveage raises the bar by allowing your clients to pay with major credit cards, PayPal, WePay and Bitcoin.
When deciding which invoicing tool is best for your business, you may also want to consider integrating your bookkeeping platform with Fundbox. This way, you can create and send invoices and get paid immediately via Fundbox while awaiting payment from your clients. Here’s how this works:
- Set up a Fundbox account and select a bookkeeping app from a list of partners (which includes QuickBooks and FreshBooks).
- If approved, you can then choose the invoice you want to advance.
- The amount of that invoice is transferred via Fundbox into your bank account as soon as one business day.
- You pay Fundbox back via weekly payments over either a 12 or 24-week repayment period.
- You deal with collecting from your client via the chosen payment method on your invoicing platform—Fundbox doesn’t interfere with your client relationships.