Zoho Adds Invoicing to its Online Suite

New business offering includes invoice generation and tracking, with free and paid levels of service.

If you run your own business, you no doubt have the same love/hate relationship with invoices that I do. Love them, because they put money in your pocket.   Hate them, because they can be a pain in the derriere.

Zoho's brand-newInvoiceservice tries to salve some of that pain with an online system for creating, sending and tracking invoices. After spending some time with it just now, I can see it being a decided improvement over my current spreadsheet and Word doc collection.

On first use, you're prompted to set up your company profile, choose templates for estimates and invoices, select e-mail formats for payment reminders, and other pre-run tasks. Most of the forms and documents use variables that get auto-filled with things like the customer name, invoice terms and the like.

You can also choose to auto-generate invoice numbers, but it doesn't allow for different invoice names for different customers, which is how I currently handle my invoices.

To create a new invoice, you fill in a form with the customer (its easy to create a new customer record right on the form), the invoice date and amount, and other details. That information is then substituted into whichever document template you choose when you create the invoice. When you're done, you can choose to save it as a draft or send it off. Recipients get a customizable e-mail with the invoice as an attached pdf.

You can select from a few different templates or create your own, but I had a few issues with the WYSIWYG editor for creating my own template. I couldn't get some of the column headers and the like to line up properly.

It's not hard to create and send invoices, especially when you don't send that many of them each month, and frankly my manual spreadsheet-and-doc system suffices there. But Zoho's system makes for easy tracking as well, with available reports on all your paid and pending invoices for today, as well as this week, month, quarter and year. You can also check on sales by customer, invoices by date, tax reports and other records.

Some other nice features such as an optional link to pay an invoice with a Paypal link to your account, exporting invoices as a pdf, and options for creating recurring invoices mean that I'll be spending more time with this new service to see if it suits my needs.

Zoho currently offers five invoices per month for free, with paid upgrades that range from $5 for 25 per month to $35 for 1500 invoices.

Have a better solution for handling your invoices?   I'd love to hear about it.   Chime in with your comments.