Welcome to Billing Boss, a product of Sage Software.

Not that pretty you say? I agree. At first Billing Boss’s user interface doesn’t look all that appealing. And seeing as though most of us judge nearly everything based on appearance at some point or another, this can keep you from digging further into it’s features. But don’t be afraid!

Before we go any further, if you haven’t yet tried Billing Boss or heard of it, then be warned, it is not bookkeeping software, or anything remotely used for balancing your bank accounts. It is strictly for billing, but does have other very useful features, and it extremely easy to use. Like most other freelancers, I enjoy doing things myself, but bookkeeping, taxes, and the fixin’s are something that I leave to my accountant. For a small fee, an accountant is well worth your peaceful sleep. Now let’s see some Billing Boss.

After you sign up for billing boss you are taken through a slew of setup pages to get your invoices and business set up perfectly. Everything from your business’ general info, taxes, company logo and even online payment integration via PayPal. Once you are done with your setup, you can invite your accountant to view all of your invoices as to automatically keep track of your income. This saves you time, since you don’t have to make a call or send that email for every new invoice payment you receive.

Invoicing is the real reason you are here so we’ll move on to that. When you come to your invoicing page, you are greeted with a listing of all of your past due, outstanding, draft, and paid invoices. From this page you can create new customers and/or invoices, as well as search through your entire history of invoices, for those of a specific customer within a specified time frame.

Once you click “Create New Invoice”, you are taken to a very simple invoicing system.

Here, you can add as many items as you would like. Billing Boss automatically calculates your totals, subtotals, and figures in charges for tax automatically. You can also choose what currency you would like your invoice in. Any major currency, and not literally, but a thousand others are available as well. Also included, is a much needed area for comments. One item of interest that I was surprised to see in such an easy to use system was the availability of figuring in a discount.

On top of all of that, Billing Boss adds in a few more useful features:

• Invoice Reports
• Payment Reports
• Import/Export Customer Lists (via .csv file)
• Free User Forum

Granted, Billing Boss does have it’s drawbacks. For instance:

• Not Mobile Friendly (clearly states that it is compatible with the iPhone, but I have had problems viewing it properly or it functioning properly on Windows Mobile using Opera Mobile and Internet Explorer)
• A couple of times the auto calculating….calculator has not taken my input in form fields for invoices properly. Simply refresh and this should fix it.

Final Thoughts
For being a free online alternative to some pay software,  it’s features and ease of use far surpass my expectations, and I would hope, anyone else’s. I would advise anyone doing business for themselves to pay an accountant to take care of your month to month finances, but at the same time for simply invoicing your clients and receiving payments, use Billing Boss. It’s an excellent piece of software. Let me know what you think.

Update Via The Comments
Regarding the mobile version of Billing Boss:
“The mobile Billing Boss experience is designed for the iPhone and Google Android. Although it will display on Windows Mobile, it isn’t designed to run there and doesn’t work very well (same goes for Opera Mini). Although we’d like to run perfectly on every device, sadly time is limited and we have to choose.” ~ Chuck LeDuc Díaz of Sage Spark