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