Invoicing software is all-or-nothing. Either it will let you sort your invoices by customer and by date, or it will let you sort them by customer and by amount. The invoices won’t show up as neatly for you.
Some software is called “enterprise.” It is big and complex and expensive and hard to learn. Companies buy it, use it, and then wonder why nobody at their company can use it.
Small businesses have unusual access to powerful software. Most big software companies don’t make software for small business. But most small businesses will settle for anything good enough for invoicing.
Fortunately, there are good invoicing programs out there. But it’s hard to find any of them.
I asked our office manager for help, and she told me: “The only invoicing software I’ve used is a shareware program called Invoicera. It works, but it’s awful. You enter everything manually, which isn’t bad except that it doesn’t let you sort the invoices by customer and date. So you can’t look at an invoice and see immediately when a customer owes you money and when that payment is late.”
“What about QuickBooks?” I asked.
“It’s good,” she said, “but it’s too complicated. QuickBooks has invoicing programs for small business software, but it’s a separate program. You buy it, and then you have to find a cheap way to get data out of QuickBooks and into the invoicing program. There’s no standard way to do it. The invoices are mixed in with all the other data, and the invoices themselves aren’t very clean.
“I tried invoicing software from Intuit, the company that makes QuickBooks, and it was really complicated to set up. I also tried invoicing software from Peachtree,