The Best Billing and Invoicing Software (2024)

Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks

Buying Guide: The Best Billing and Invoicing Software

Easier Ways to Pay

The cliché about the world not beating a path to your door seems to be doubly true when it's regarding people who owe you money. The reality is, if you don't track down payment for a service or product, then your customers most likely won't rush to fork it over on their own. This is especially true of smaller business owners or freelance operators. Luckily, great billing and invoicing solutions can remove a lot of the pain in the billing process, giving you more options for receiving payments and speeding up your tasks. This type of software helps you add more electronic payment channels and mobile payment networks that can make paying quicker and easier for your customers. Other products specialize in helping you keep up on billing and invoicing tasks.

The type of business you run as well as the clients you have will all factor into your choice of billing and invoicing solution. Retail operations live on cash and credit payments, while services-based businesses and freelancers have particular needs and can work with online payment solutions. For small to midsize businesses (SMBs), the ability to articulate the services rendered as well as the payment options and timing in a professional way is critical to getting paid quicker. Being able to juggle tax information, create receipts, expense accounts, as well as automate follow-up notices, are valuable features for SMBs.

This is where billing and invoicing software comes in. This software gives you the means to track your sales or services rendered, who was billed, the fees or charges applied, and when payment was received (or when it was supposed to be received but wasn't). It also gives you a data path to record all of that data in your other accounting and bookkeeping systems. In accounting terms, this workflow is part of Accounts Receivable. And while many smaller businesses still maintain these kinds of records and prepare invoices using a spreadsheet or word processing application, there are plenty of specialized software apps that let you perform the task quicker, more easily, and with much less effort. Best of all, many of them are inexpensive or even free to use.

In our reviews, we examined standalone invoicing and billing systems. We also took a deeper look into the billing capabilities of some more comprehensive accounting systems in which the billing process is just a part. These systems also include the data for business purchases, inventory management, and general ledger accounting. All of the billing and accounting systems we reviewed are delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps that are located in the cloud rather than locally installed. Therefore, all you need is a web browser and you're in business.

More Than Just Sending a Bill

Many of the billing systems we reviewed let you enter and record the initial sales transaction, which is a good place to start the billing process. In accounting terms, this is called "Sales Order Entry" or simply Order Entry. Even if you're just looking to send out a bill and receive payment, you still need to look at the Order Entry part of the system and determine how it will work with the kind of business you're operating.

Most full-blown accounting systems and a number of billing systems have an "Order Entry of Sales" front end where you can key in the items or services for which you want to bill. For the most part, these items or services need to be defined before you can use the sales front end. With most accounting systems, Sales integrates with Inventory so that it will be the point at which items and prices get defined. With a simpler billing system, you'll have to create these items, descriptions, and prices as a separate process. Taxes, such as Sales Tax or Value Added Tax (VAT), is another place at which billing-oriented systems differ from more robust accounting ones. Many accounting systems provide tax tables that will automatically calculate the requisite sales tax, or they will integrate with a tax service app such Avalara's AvaTax. However, many billing systems skip such niceties and require you to enter the sales tax rate on each individual sales transaction.

Actually creating the bill is another consideration. Many of the billing apps and subsystems we examined let you create a bill on the fly by using a mobile app. This is a great feature if you want to be able to create a bill at the time of sale or immediately when a service is provided while you're at a customer's location. The ability to email that bill or invoice is another desirable feature for many users, as is automatically creating bills for recurring charges every month or according to some other regular time period.

Many of the apps we looked at also included more advanced capabilities that might apply to your particular operation. These include the ability to handle multiple currencies for those businesses that operate in more than one country, or pop-up timers if you bill by the hour. Keep in mind, however, that we looked at billing and invoicing apps, not time tracking or expense tracking software—each of which has a different target audience.

Something else to keep in mind is that, while the terms "invoice" and "statement" are used interchangeably occasionally, they're actually not the same thing. An invoice may have multiple itemized charges and services listed on it, but refers to a single sale. A statement, on the other hand, itemizes outstanding, current, and historical invoice charges and payment transactions. A statement gives the status of a customer's account at the end of a billing period or, with some billing and accounting apps, on demand.

Tracking Cash Flow

Another area that's important to consider when selecting billing software is how you will get paid. For many years, accepting cash or checks were your only alternatives, especially for small businesses. That's far from true these days. Credit cards especially are considered a must-have payment option even for small businesses. Fortunately, billing platforms incorporate the ability to accept credit cards. There's always a charge for this, which is usually a percentage of the transaction as well as a per-transaction or monthly fee. You'll need to read this fine print carefully as this charge can be on top of the percentage fee charged by the actual credit card processor. You need to decide whether this kind of charge is worthwhile. In many cases, having access to the payment more or less immediately is well worth the charge, which is deductible from revenue as a business expense in any case. Some software vendors can also provide a customer portal where your customers can pay their invoices electronically through a wire transfer or Automated Clearing House (ACH) transaction. Again, there is often a fee for this. But, as with a credit card, this fee is a business expense and may be worthwhile at reducing or eliminating the receivables.

Finally, there's reporting. Good reporting capabilities are always something you should seek out and billing software is no exception. Most users, especially smaller businesses, won't need dozens of reports. But you will want to know which bills are past due and how long past due they are. You will also want to be able to see your revenue flow at any point in time. You'll want to have the capability of sending customers Past Due notices and reminders when necessary. Effectively managing your cash flow is a primary reason for using an invoicing app.

Last but not least, and related to reporting, is the ability to integrate your billing system with your back-end accounting system. There's a lot of competition to Intuit Quickbooks these days, so even small businesses need to make sure their billing system and accounting system can effectively talk with one another. If they don't, then these businesses could wind up doing a lot of unnecessary manual entry.

The apps we tested can provide multiple options for invoice templates. Customization comes by way of adding your company log, specific font or branding identity artwork as well as defining the fields to suit your company and your customer's needs.