The 5 Best Invoicing Tools for Small Business Owners

As much of a pain invoicing can be, it’s essential if you actually want to get paid. So trying to decide which invoicing tool to use can be difficult. Because you want to make it easy for clients to pay you but also easy for you to keep track of who hasn’t paid.

Here are the 5 best tools for invoicing. I’ve personally tried four of the five. 

And.co (FREE)

And.co was my hands down favorite for a very long time. Partly because it makes it really easy to create contracts that can be signed online. Which means no more printing, signing, and then scanning and sending it back. But I also love it because they make invoicing really easy. Also, it will remind you when stuff hasn’t been paid.

Additionally, they send notifications to let you know when an invoice has been viewed and of course when it’s been paid. Their invoicing tool makes it really easy to set up clients with the option to pay using a credit card or PayPal, giving your clients more flexibility.

As with any invoicing tool, when a payment is processed there is going to be a slight fee. However, it’s the same usual fee. And And.co more then makes up for it with how easy it is to automatically have the payment transferred to your bank account.

PayPal (FREE)

PayPal is just easy because pretty much every business has a business PayPal account. Since you send and receive money yourself through it it, it’s an easy option to send invoices through PayPal.

Again with any payment processor, there is a fee, but the ease of use to send an invoice through a tool you are likely already using is a big plus in the pro column of using PayPal.

Quickbooks Self-Employed ($5/mo to start)

QuickBooks Self-Employed is what I use to keep track of all my business expenses and income. I love it because it calculates what I need to pay in taxes. It also has an invoicing feature. The only thing I didn’t like about the QuickBooks Self-Employed invoicing feature is that it would not approve me to have clients pay my invoice via credit card.

I still don’t know why it wouldn’t approve me and it’s not to say you wouldn’t be approved. I know plenty of people who are able to invoice via QuickBooks Self-Employed and get paid by credit card if the clients of chips so chose.

But using it to track expenses is more than worth the cost. If you drive for Lyft or something like it, QBSE will also track your mileage for you, again making tax time easy.

QuickBooks Self-Employed is usually $10 a month, but if you use my link, you’ll get  50% off.

Dubsado ($35/month)

Dubsado is primarily a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) but it also makes it extremely easy to send proposals, contracts, and invoices. Perhaps the real reason I love Dubsado (I moved to it from And.co) is that you can automate the sending of these things saving me tons of time on administrative work.

For my monthly Pinterest clients I have recurring invoices set up each month. So I never have to spend a day invoicing everyone, it does it automatically.

I actually tend to forget what day it sends the invoice to various clients. I only notice when I get notified it’s paid (typically the same day).

So I actually use Dubsado in conjunction with Quickbooks Self-Employed. Dubsado automates proposals and invoices and then I use QBSE for bookkeeping.

Dubsado is $35 a month or $350/year, but you can get 30% off with my code: stapleton

Freshbooks (starts at $15/mo)

Freshbooks is perhaps the most well known invoicing tool next to Quickbooks. One of the perks is that it reduces the amount of paypal fees you pay by getting you access to the Paypal Business Payments option. This reduces your Paypal fee for bank transfer payment to just $0.50 from 2.9%.

For example, if your invoicing $350 the usual Paypal fee would be a little over $10.00 or you could invoice through Freshbooks and see a fee of just $0.50 if your client selects “Paypal Transfer”.

Since I don’t have experience using Freshbooks myself, I reached out to my friend Sylvia, here is what Sylvia Inks, a coach for small business owners had to say about Freshbooks:

“FreshBooks makes it simple to collect money to stay in business. You can send a one-time invoice, collect an initial deposit and later a remaining payment, create recurring invoices for monthly services, send automatic reminders for past due invoices, and have late fees automatically calculated and added to past due invoices. You can easily see which invoices have been paid and which clients have outstanding balances. I’ve found that FreshBooks is easy to understand for most entrepreneurs.”

Freshbooks starts at just $15.00/month for up to 5 clients. The next level is $25.00/month for up to 50 clients.

Bottom Line

Whatever invoicing tool you decide to use, find one that works best for you and stick with it. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to track down payments through different tools and different invoicing numbers. Using just one tool makes life a lot easier when you’re dealing with your business’ bookkeeping