Nobody likes creating invoices. They’re a pain to produce, to send, and to follow up on. But with the growing power of online applications, the number of invoicing web apps has boomed in the last couple of years and they keep getting better. Dealing with your invoices online also has the advantage of working from anywhere.
One such web app is The Invoice Machine from Bombia Design. This stunning invoice creator really is a machine and clearly built with design in mind. Let’s take a look at what The Invoice Machine can do for you, and what it can’t.
Produce Invoices that Look Great
After I discovered that trying to make invoices in Pages each month was not the best solution, I went on the search for the online invoicing app that would suit me best. After browsing the feature lists of many different sites, I settled on The Invoice Machine and I don’t look back. I
t is one of the most beautiful invoicing apps I have come across and equally one of the simplest. The interface is divided up into five main tabs; Invoices, Recurring, Projects, Items, and Clients.
Creating a new invoice is a breeze. Simply click a little plus sign and fill in the details. Invoice Machine will make it look clean and presentable by its self. The Invoice Machine gives you a nice range of options when creating or editing invoices. Take a look at the image below for the full picture, but it certainly makes things like taxes, currency, and language easy. Adding descriptions of charges is also not a problem, allowing you to add individual products and services, or a charge per hour.
Creating a new invoice is easy.
Click here to view an example of what the above invoice looked like after saving it.
Send & You Shall Receive
After creating your new invoice, getting it out to the client can be done via email directly through The Invoice Machine, or downloaded as a PDF file to send to clients yourself.
Email your invoices directly from the application.
A feature I particularly like is its PayPal integration. After sending out your invoice, if you’ve entered your PayPal details into The Invoice Machine settings and your client pays you via PayPal, then upon payment being made, Invoice Machine will automatically update the status on your invoice to ‘Payed’. When payments are made by another means, you can input the payment manually.
After the payment has been completed you are offered to send your client a ‘Thank You’ email, which is a nice touch.
Projects & Items
Along with the ability to send off automatic recurring invoices, you can also set up charges called ‘Projects’ and ‘Items’. These are useful if you often find yourself billing clients for the same thing over and over again. You can create as many Projects and Items as required to add to your invoices later.
A great thing that comes with the Projects is a timer, which opens up in a small window, letting you time in the background. When you’ve completed your task, clicking ‘Add Time’ instantly sends the new time to Invoice Machine and calculates the running cost so far. There is also a free Invoice Machine Dashboard Widget timer available for Mac OS X.
An attractive time is also available.
Plans & Pricing
The Invoice Machine has a very simple pricing system. Apart from a small link in the footer of free accounts, all of the different plans have the same feature set. The only difference is the number of invoices you can create each month and the number of users. The pricing seems fair, and when you boil the price down even the Medium account is only really 40 cents per invoice provided you make full use of the plan.
The pricing is competitive with other options.
Conclusion
I have been very impressed with The Invoice Machine’s ease of use, its efficiency and flair. For some, the feature set may be lacking compared to other applications out there but if it looks like this could suit your workflow then I’d certainly recommend giving it a go. Let us know what your experience has been with The Invoice Machine, if you prefer to bill from another app, or if you still love the good old invoicing book.
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I use InvoiceMachine as my invoicing software and love it. All the other web applications out there were to complex and didn’t work with my thought process. InvoiceMachine works very simply and flows nicely.
I highly suggest InvoiceMachine over any other invoicing software.
Good article on this great piece application!
The only feature that this is really lacking is estimates. I like sending my clients estimates on their work so they know exactly what they are getting.
The Invoice Machine is absolutely great, no doubt.
However,
in March 2009 they announced a big update:
- http://twitter.com/invoicemachine/status/1353344837
Since then? No update at all, just silence…
Their last blog post is from March 2009 as well, and their twitter account seems dead as a doornail:
- http://invoicemachine.com/blog
- http://twitter.com/invoicemachine
I use a paid account because the app is great.
But I wonder if there’ll be any new features at the horizon…
I love InvoiceMachine as a product and a concept, however I ran in to a very ugly side of their business when after experiencing failures with recurring invoices. (They simply didn’t work, I attempted to set this up with numerous different items changing multiple attributes to try and come to a conclusion if it was me making the error or not, no amount of variations of setup seemed to work, it just WOULDNT generate automatically for me.
There is no help of any detail what so ever on the recurring billing to be found on the site, so I emailed them directly a total of 4 times over the space of a month without ever getting a reply. Even now several months later I have had no reply.
I also attempted to contact them via twitter and also by leaving comments on their blog, neither of which were responded to. This was all AFTER I had already subscribed to to the service.
Needless to say, this left a bad taste in my mouth.
Just to clarify, I do still use invoicemachine as I have credit on their system by hand. I will however be looking into another piece of software to work with after this month.
I do so reluctantly because it’s far and away my favourite application in design and simplicity. If only they had taking 5 minutes to respond to my several emails over the functionality of a core and what should be very simple part of their product I would have happily used it until the cows came home.
So mixed emotions on this, as a paying customer, they are pathetic.. as a general application i still love it, despite the never solved recurring invoice feature.
I’ve used Invoice Machine for 10 months or so.
The design is beautiful and extremely simple to use. It produces professional looking invoices that you can quite happily send on to clients. Feedback from clients is similar: Highly professional and easy to use.
I would strongly recommend The Invoice Machine.
Thanks for the review! Already signed up and created 1 invoice, works perfect, exactly what I needed! Thank you
I agree with Greg. Its a great app and I was using it for 3 months, but had to look else where since they were not helping me with some of the issues I had. I am not a techi and have questions more often
Anyway I found Curdbee (http://curdbee.com/) in my research and I must say they are thousand times better at what they promise. Simple, functional and very supportive. I am still using their free account and they have responded to all my questions to date and I am saving close to $150/yr with them. What else I should expect?
Just gave curdbee a try, and I have to say wow. What a fantastic little site, and so affordable too.
A really nice find, thanks so much for suggesting it!
That little bee has put a smile back on my face
I think the paypal integration is one of its best features
Screw this app, its dead in the water. Freshbooks, Curdbee, and Ballpark are where its at.
I also thought invoice machene was great.Red some good reviews etc…
after upgrading i realized that the recurring invoices where not working. I tried to contact support, but noone replyed my mails…
I’m surprised to hear that a lot of people have not had such a great experience with Invoice Machine. It sounds as though their support is lacking and they’re not updating things that aren’t working.
Lets hope that they come right in the near future!
As Kira mentioned, Curdbee looks like a nice alternative!
Thanks for your comments.
I personally use Zoho Invoicing and have not had any problems. I like the features. It’s not free but the cost is very minimal. I’m sure Invoice Machine is good but I just haven’t had much incentive to switch.
I tried using invoice machine as it’s simply beautiful invoice generator but as the rest of the people the lack of support it’s horrible and the freaking recurring invoices just don’t work.
Thanks Henry,
I recently found The Invoice Machine and was immediately stunned on how clean the interface was.
I am moments from purchasing when I decide to visit there Twitter, big mistake I noticed its been over a year since there last tweet, same goes with there blog.
Are they in jail?
You would think if they were doing a good thing, business would follow more room to hire interns to manage the odd posting etc.
In addition, the estimate functionality could be a major importance, and I cannot import my existing contacts.
Nonetheless, I might subscribe and just pray there is an update!
Just a quick update, they seem to be back in full force with a new version coming in 24 hours … I’ve asked a few support requests publicly through both Twitter and there Blog with instant replies rectifying the issues. I am now a paid subscriber and still holding on the hope that things with go smoothly, although my 3rd invoice has yet to update automatically to paid status. Will reply in a few weeks after the new version has taken effect.
I’ve recently been using http://www.billfor.it as was invited to their beta site. The invoicing and quotation side of things is really good and easy to use. The invoices can be fully customised too – although the HTML editor is a little hard to get to grips with
To be honest, I prefer it to Invoice Machine – as I had quite a few issues when I used them. The only thing they have over http://www.billfor.it is the timesheet, but according to their roadmap this is on its way?
Nice job on the application; it looks gorgeous. Any chance of getting a mobile version for those of us that want to add time easily with our phones? A simple mobile stylesheet that cuts out a lot of the excess graphics and makes it look pretty on a phone would be fantastic.
I am just hoping that it will have pay pal integration ,if not now then,in future,as the transactions through pay pal has increased manifold.
That is great little article for newbies.Can you please post a video of his lecture.
Yes pay pal integration is important.By the look of these it seems a useful user friendly machine.Can you please update us about the forthcoming versions.
The API in this invoice machine lets you hook up your own application with The Machine’s functionality. There are many situations where this could be useful. Let’s say you run an online store and want to send an invoice to your customer each time a purchase is made.
You really need a simple mobile site (like the billingboss.com http://www.billingboss.com/api/simply/home ) for easy phone access to open and update invoices… and ultimately to create and send the invoice while still onsite.