Billing Boss is a simple online invoicing tool that allows you to send invoices quickly to your customers and get paid online.
This tool is great for small businesses who want to get invoices out to
customers faster so they can get paid faster.
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Billing Boss - Free Online Invoicing
Posted Feb 4, 10
Payment Plus is an Add-On to BillingBoss and allows you to use your existing Merchant Account to process online payments.
Payment Plus currently supports the following processors:
- Authorize.Net
- CyberSource (US)
- Moneris (Canada)
- E-xact (Canada)
- BeanStream Interac Payments (Canada)
- BeanStream Credit Card processing
With Billing Boss Payment Plus, you have a new way for presenting invoices to customers and getting paid. You can send your invoice electronically, present the invoice nicely on a web page and give your customer the flexibility of paying for it using their credit cards.
The steps are pretty simple and easy to follow. Here is a quick summary of how to use Billing Boss to get paid. To make it easier to understand, I have included some screenshots.
1. Login Billing Boss and go to ‘Settings' tab. Select Online Payments to enter your merchant account information. In the screenshot, i entered e-xact as an option. Save your change by clicking on the Save and Continue button.
2. Now create a new invoice and Save. Screenshot not included.
3. After the invoice is saved. You will be presented with a list of credit card to allow. Depending on your merchant account, you might be allowed to process certain cards. Select the correct ones in the list by clicking on the checkboxes. Click on Save to remember the setting for your next invoice. See the screenshot below.
4. Click on Send link on the left to send the invoice by email. You can enter the email address of your customers if you know their emails or click on more contacts to see a list of existing email addressed entered. See screenshot below.
5. Your customer will receive an email in their inbox. In the email, there is a link to view the invoice online and pay it online.
6. Your customer happily clicks on the link and taken to a web page hosted by Billing Boss that looks like the screenshot below.
7. The customer can review the invoice to make sure the amount is correct. Click on Pay Invoice on the left to pay by credit card. Your customer would neeed to enter their credit card numbers and address. Click on Pay Now button to finish the transaction.
8. Billing Boss talks to your merchant account provider (e-xact in this case) and charges the customer's credit card with the amount of the invoice. You can view the payment in the virtual terminal provided by your merchant account provider. Billing Boss will mark the invoice as paid and store the payment information.
That is it. A new way of collecting from your customers and fully automated.
For more information on Billing Boss with Payment Plus see http://www.sagespark.com/paymentplus
If you have any questions, you can contact us through our forum , twitter or email info@billingboss.com
Richard
Billing Boss and Sage Spark development
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Posted Jan 30, 10
What happens when you get a bunch of internet geeks made up of developers, designers, product management and marketing staff in a room to develop a new web based product? ehmm..lets just say that you might end up with another Microsoft Word - 1 million interesting features - only 10% of them ever used or learned about.
That was the challenge we faced and continue to face when we develop Billing Boss - trust me, it is so very easy to build tons of cool features and functionalities into Billing Boss and while we are at, build a very complex interface that requires you to spend more time than you have trying to figure out how to use the product. Yes - its very easy to do that. It happens all the time - but that wasn't our goal. Hard STOP.
Our goal was to keep it simple - what we learned from our customers and customer visits was that at the end of a long and tiring day trying to get customers, drive sales or manage your business, the last thing you want to be doing is spending another 2-3 hours manually sending out invoices, tracking payments and sending notes and emails to people who haven't paid you yet nor did you want to be spending an additional hour or two being frustrated trying to learn how to use an application that was suppose to HELP and SIMPLIFY your invoicing tasks! FOCUS - IN and OUT. That was the goal.
When you actually stop and take a look at BillingBoss - it is really quite a complex tool that we have spent a lot of time and effort trying to make simple. Consider the core tasks that you use Billing Boss for - invoicing, tracking, payment collection, quotes and customer management - each tasks was designed to take less than a minute max per customer..and in many cases its a lot less.
For example - our Dashboard was designed to give you an overview of your invoices, whats paid, whats outstanding and what the status of the invoices are as well the ability to drill down into individual invoices - trust me, we could have made the dashboard really cool and complex with lots of bells and whistles - but the reality was - we didn't want to distract you from your core goal - get your invoicing done, check who's paid and get out and spend time with your family, go to the gym or even better..get some sleep!
YEAH! SLEEP IS SO NOT OVERRATED!
Here's another example - did you know that when you send an invoice out to your customer through BillingBoss, your customers who receive the invoice can hit "reply", type in some notes or comment into their email client and hit "send" and the message will be routed back to your email address that you have on file with BillingBoss? This allows you to maintain relationships with customers, manage disputes or get feedback from your customers directly to your email address! Again, sounds simple right?
The reality is that we could have followed many of the web 2.0 models and just forwarded the message to you but force you back to Billing Boss to send a response - but that would have made things more complicated in terms of the interface as well as your experience. We know you manage your e-mail communications from one inbox - its simpler, easier and you most likely access it from your iPhone..why make you go somewhere else to check messages from your customers that are responding to an invoice you sent them? FOCUS - In and OUT.
So while a lot of our competitors work at making their product more feature rich but also more complex and harder to learn - we work ten times as hard in making Billing Boss simpler, easier to learn and use while still focusing on the end goal of helping you manage your invoicing, payments and in the end save time and getting paid faster!
We love your feedback and are always considering new features/applications to develop to help you, our business users, free up more time. Tell us what keeps you up at night and we will see if we can help solve it for you!
Enjoy!
Peter Liao
Product Management
Billing Boss and SageSpark
Posted Jan 21, 10
Billing Boss is an innovative solution for helping you manage cash flow, invoices as well as new and existing customers. Although we tend to think about invoicing as an after sale activity where you have sold your service/product and now are looking to collect payment, you don't necessarily have to use it in that sequence.
One of the innovative ways you can use Billing Boss to get paid is to capture a pre-payment or deposit for services prior to providing the service.
In doing so, you reduce your risk of default or slow payment by collecting payment upfront from customers. Once you have established that the customer is credible or low risk, then you can revert back to providing the service and then billing for it.
The advantage of using Billing Boss for this is that it creates an electronic paper trail of the pre-payment/deposit so you know who has already paid and you don't bill them again, as well you can use the pre-payment mechanism at your discretion - so if you are meeting with a first time client, you can ask for pre-payment or deposit, ensure that payment goes through first and then provide the service. You may not necessarily do this with other clients or you may do it with clients who have defaulted in the past or are very slow to pay - its all at your discretion.
Just a quick note though - this is really only most effective when you have a merchant account and get paid via credit card - otherwise, if it's via check you have to wait for it to clear before you can associate payment to the invoice. This is not to say you can't do it, but its most efficient with a credit card PLUS it gives your client a 30 day window to pay their credit card provider which free's up their cash flow!
So, how do you ask - can I do this? its pretty simple really. There are multiple ways of doing this but here is the easiest and allows for some back and forth between you and the customer.
Assuming you have already setup your Billing Boss account, simple sign into Billing Boss and go to the Invoicing/Quotes tab and click on Create New Quote:
Fill in the details of the quote, save it and then sent it by clicking on the send link in the options bar on the left hand side:
Once you have had confirmation from your client about the quote, you can simply convert the quote into a invoice by clicking on the Convert into Invoice link in the options button where the quote is presented or go to the Invoices & Quotes tab and look for the quote in the Quotes section.
Once the customer has paid your invoice, it will show up as paid in the invoices section- and KA POW! you are ready to go.
You have just used Billing Boss to reduce your risk in getting paid!
Pretty Easy, Fast and Cool huh! Remember, getting paid faster and smarter doesn't need to be hard and time consuming if you are using the right tools!
If you have any questions, you can contact us through our forum , twitter or email info@billingboss.com
Enjoy!
Peter
The Billing Boss Team
Posted Dec 15, 09
We have released a new feature for Billing Boss. You can now save quotes (or estimate as some people call it). This is a popular request from our users.
You might have noticed a new button that says Create New Quote at the top of the screen. See below.
Click on it will take you to a new quote page like this. It looks very similar to the new invoice page. You can enter a quote number for your reference. Fill in the rest of the details and you can save it. You can send a quote or save it as a PDF similar to what you can do with an invoice.
Once a quote is saved, you can find it in the invoice list page which has been renamed Invoices and Quotes (the first page you see once you logged into Billing Boss).
You can convert a quote into an invoice. This means that your customer has accepted your quote and wishes to purchase service or product from you. You can click on the convert into invoice link in the quote list. Another way to convert a quote into an invoice is when you are viewing a quote. Click on the quote in the quote list to see the quote. On the left side of the page, you can see a list of options. convert into invoice is one of the options as illustrated below.
That is it. Simple enough?
If you have any questions, you can contact us through our forum , twitter or email info@billingboss.com
Richard Zhou
The Billing Boss Team
Posted Oct 2, 09
It just came to our attention that people are looking in the app store for Billing Boss. You won't find an app there and there's no need to download antyhing. Just to go www.billingboss.com in Safari on your iPhone. You'll see the mobile version and can get started right away.
Posted Sep 23, 09
Today we deployed a new version of Billing Boss.
This new version allow you to use your Billing Boss account to access Sage Spark (without the need to create a new account). With this option, you can easily access Billing Boss support forum, purchase services and most importantly, interact with fellow small business owners on Sage Spark.
Expect more exciting changes coming to Billing Boss in the near future.
Richard
The Billing Boss Team
info@billingboss.com
Posted Jul 3, 09
5 invoice templates are now available. You can see a list of templates after you save an invoice. Just click on the name of the templates to see what it looks like.
One other significant feature is when you add a new line to an invoice. the quantity field is set to one be default so if you are charging a fixed fee, it saves you some typing.
Other changes are mostly behind the scenes like security improvements, inconsistent layout issues.
Tell us if you like the choices or if you will like to see more.
Posted Jul 2, 09
Billing Boss Blog has a new home on Sage Spark. Sage Spark is a community for business owners who focused on success. Billing Boss is only one of the tools and services available on this site. Please check out our other tools and services here.
Come back and check our blog regularly. There is also a forum dedicated to Billing Boss on this site . You can post your questions and suggestion here.