Custom invoicing software

Invoicing is not accounting

This is the most important point on this page. Your general ledger, tax reporting, bank reconciliation and financial statements belong in proper accounting software such as QuickBooks or Xero, looked after by your bookkeeper or accountant. We do not rebuild that, and you should be wary of anyone who offers to.

Invoicing is the part before the books: working out what to bill, building the invoice, getting it to the customer, collecting the money and following up. That part is often where a business is most unusual, and where the invoice screen in an accounting tool runs out. Custom invoicing software handles that front end and posts clean invoices and payments into your accounting system.

What invoicing software needs to do

• Build invoices from the work itself: completed jobs, approved timesheets, usage, deliveries or milestones.
• Your pricing rules: rate cards, tiers, minimums, discounts, deposits, retainers, surcharges and taxes.
• Subscription billing: recurring plans, prorating, upgrades, pauses and renewals.
• Online payment by card or bank transfer, saved payment methods and autopay.
• Accounts receivable tracking: aging, partial payments, credits and write-offs.
• Automatic reminders and dunning for failed or late payments, with a tone you control.
• A customer portal where clients see invoices, download statements and pay.
• Sync of invoices, payments and customers to QuickBooks or Xero.

When off-the-shelf invoicing is enough

If you send a modest number of invoices with simple line items, the invoicing built into QuickBooks, Xero or FreshBooks is the right answer, and adding software would only add cost. For straightforward recurring plans, Stripe Billing and Chargebee handle subscription billing well and connect to most accounting tools.

Custom invoicing software is worth it when someone spends days each month assembling invoices by hand, when your pricing lives in a spreadsheet nobody else understands, or when billing depends on data in another system such as a job management tool, a booking platform or your own product. It is also the usual route for businesses whose pricing combines things off-the-shelf tools treat separately, for example a monthly fee plus usage plus one-off project work on the same invoice.

What we build

• Invoice generation straight from your operational data, with a review screen before anything is sent.
• A pricing engine that encodes your rules once, so invoices stop depending on one person’s memory.
• Payments through a processor such as Stripe, with card on file, autopay and payment links in emails and texts.
• A receivables dashboard showing who owes what, how late it is and what follow-up has been sent.
• A branded customer billing portal, which can sit inside a wider customer portal.
• Two-way sync with QuickBooks or Xero so your bookkeeper works in the tool they already know.
• Reports on revenue by customer, service and period, and on days to get paid.

Who gets the most from custom invoicing

Businesses with recurring service agreements, such as pool service and pest control, bill hundreds of customers on schedules with add-on work mixed in. Equipment rental companies bill by day, week or month with damage, fuel and delivery charges. Staffing agencies invoice clients from approved timesheets at rates that differ by role and client. Professional firms bill retainers against hours worked. In each case, the invoice is the last step of a process, and building invoicing into that process is what removes the monthly scramble.

How an invoicing project works

1. Collect real invoicesWe go through a month of your actual invoices and the spreadsheets behind them to capture every pricing rule.
2. Agree what syncs whereWith your bookkeeper, we decide how invoices, payments and customers map to your accounting system.
3. Design the screensYou click through the billing run, invoice layout and customer portal before code is written.
4. Build and test against historyWe rebuild past invoices in the new system and check every total matches before going live.
5. Launch on a billing cycleWe switch over at the start of a cycle and keep improving as your pricing changes.