A client of mine has just started trading as a Health Consultant after 13 years buried in the world of hospitals and government departments. She has picked up a consulting contract for 8 hours per week. She is lucky enough to have a limited company already setup but she needs a a couple of tools to get her going e.g. email, website and invoicing. Lets ignore the first two and move onto invoicing.

There are a couple of free options out there and the two that I think are worth having a look at are;

1. Freshbooks
2. BambooINVOICE

Freshbooks is a SaaS. You go to their website, create an account and away you go. Its all pretty intuitive and free so long as you don't have too many clients. Appappeal has some great background information on Freshbooks which gives you a feel for the company and the product. Here is a video with some of the people invloved with Freshbooks.

However my customer wasn't keen on having their data in a location that they didn't control so BambooINVOICE looked like the better solution.

After setting up a domain which will have a website on later I created a subdomain and installed BambooINVOICE. From downloading the code to having a fully fucntional Invoice generator up and running took about 30 minutes - that's an amazing result and why I like free open source tools. I then spent another 15 minutes building a quick logo to go on all the invoices.

The next stage will be to setup some auto backups on the data as it is financial and will be needed by her accountant. However the tool has a function to export to Excel so I might just ask the customer to do an export after every invoice. It might take an extra 3 minutes to do an invoice but it costs less than formal backups

In essence FreshBooks and BambooINVOICE provide similar functionality. The only reason I would go with FreshBooks for this client is if she wasn't going to invest in a website at a later date so she could have saved money on the domain name and hosting but as a previous post points out hosting is not going to cost much more than NZ$120.

I hope that this short article has been helpful on helping you choose a free invoicing service.

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