Outdated programs need upgrades to the recent versions to guarantee timely and full invoice settlements. Appropriate cash flow management is important and if poorly managed could lead to insolvency. If your business is facing financial difficulties, you can Get Advice on Business Insolvency here.

What are Account Receivables?

Accounts Receivables is the outstanding or the pending invoices that your business possesses or the outstanding amounts that are owed from their clients. The mentioned concept refers to given accounts that any individual has a given right to receive since you have delivered their product or services. Mostly, these receivables present given lines of credit that are extended by businesses and due within relatively shorter time periods that range from a few days to even a year. Proper management of accounts receivables is essential for a healthy financial outlook, and seeking guidance from an accounting firm Hong Kong can provide valuable insights into optimizing this aspect of your business.

One of the common pieces of advice that have been uncovered in the recent periods is to think critically involving the actual wordings on the terms applied to the invoices. Being polite as well as asking for payments within 30 days appears to get customers paid quicker than words such as ‘the due on receipts’ or ‘due immediately.”

As such, the Credit Research Foundation (CRF) often conducts surveys by industries that detail the relevant statistical evidence or facts relating to domestic/internal accounts receivable performances.
General debt collection as well as recovery can sometimes be complicated as well as seem to be a costly task for most people or businesses. As such, they are often faced with varying challenges as they try to clear their books of delinquent debts as well as getting their cash flowing again, such as:

• Arriving at cordial, out-of-court solutions.
• Communicating and negotiating in the debtor’s language.
• Appreciating the legislations of the land(s) where the debtors are located.
• Handling debtors and debt collection intermediaries in several states, across numerous time zones, as well as multiple currencies
• Finding debt collection service providers that consolidate all global commercial debt collection activities into one sufficient and effective collection operations.
• Finding dependable and cost-effective legal counsels in the business’ debtor’s jurisdiction.

In other words, giving customers a little flex room creates a standard good-will as well as speed up payments. This is proof of an evidence of the complex psychology of money expressing itself in the account receivables process.
Businesses that know their consumers well, and understand what inspires their accounting – plus accountability – help them implement other strategies in the future to receive payments without being unfriendly. If you need help with your retail business, Consult Group’s expertise in FMCG distribution and sales can help you make informed decisions toward success.

Why is Invoicing Important to Your Business?

Invoices are commercial documents that are issued by businesses to their customers. The documents clearly represent the products quantities, as well as the agreed prices for the products and services the business have provided the customers.

Invoices show the customers their obligation to pay the business, following the payment terms. As such it is important to have invoices for the reasons that they give adequate data of the flow of operations in the organization.

Relevant evidence is to ensure the keeping of good books as well as records. However, the most important reason is to have control over the business and assessing the profitability in line with the cash-flow situations. You’ll also need annual return filing assistance to ensure your company is compliant with regulatory requirements. Discover more about annual return filing in Singapore here.

Therefore, this makes everyone aware of the potential challenges soon enough and make business decisions with all the available data at hand.

What Happens When Your Business fails to collect its Accounts Receivables?

If organizations fail to gather and collect their accounts receivables, they can opt to take and report their debtors to court over the unsettled debts, and even outsource the debt collection activities to a suitable third party bill collector.

In other most given cases, entities can also opt for selling their accounts receivables for a profit to the factoring entity that will then collect the debts. These factoring companies usually offer some cash up-front, thereby making them attractive options for businesses that require a boost to their operating capital.

Therefore, if you report invoice/account receivables as income and fail to receive payments, it is claimed as bad debts. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) permits such an individual to subtract bad debts as income or revenue on their previous returns.

The Accounts Receivables Best Practices

It is advisable for your business not to make assumptions regarding consumers involving their purchases because it does not act as a guarantee to receive their payments.

On the other hand, slow paying customers may necessitate your company to draw down cash reserves, as well as increase the amounts of financing required to cover operations.

As the financial records get older, the probability of collecting the outstanding receivable accounts diminishes. Therefore, the more amounts or money that the company has tied up in their receivables, the lesser the money or cash is available for running their business operations. If you own a dental business, then you should also look into HR for dental offices in the UK to develop policies that are aligned with your business goals.

The awareness of the accounts receivable best practices become more important small companies engaging  as well as startups which are heavily dependent on receivables.

As such the following methods can be employed in your business operations to oversee the smooth operation of accounts receivables:

1. Deliver invoices electronically – 

Rather than having a company invoicing all their clients at, for instance, the end of every one week cycle, invoicing them at just the right period to get necessary approvals for immediate payment is adopted.

For example, if clients have to allow two weeks for approval before the payments are sanctioned at a Council and Board meetings, invoicing two weeks before the Council as well as the Board meeting every period they meet can be effective.

If the board meets twice a month, then the organization can invoice twice a month. This would require separate billing dates, as well as, perhaps, first accounting approximations, for potentially every existing client, but the cash-flow improvement can be substantial. As businesses streamline operations and improve efficiency, Fire Watch Guards in Jacksonville provide dependable support that helps protect properties and keep daily activity running smoothly.

Besides, if a job is complete, the company can invoice it immediately, regardless of what their client invoice cycles might be. Whether through electronic networks, e-mails or fax, automatic deliveries are timelier. It is important not to miss the several days it takes invoices to travel over the mail to its endpoint.

2. Have EFT, Paypal & 2Checkout payment options in addition to Other Payment Options -

Increasing numbers of companies are currently considering paying their suppliers using Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) as well as other online payment systems that are available to them.

By stating on their invoices that EFTs may make payments, organizations will enable their consumers to deposit their payment directly to the company’s bank account.

This is possible by only including on the company’s invoice their EFT banking information or Paypal or Other information. This can assist a company to achieve their objective of ensuring cash flows.

3. Review the Accounts Receivables Regularly is the best of all practices -

It is important for businesses to track the aging of their accounts receivables, as well as systematically follow-up on every account that has past due more than the pre-determined number of days.

As a good practice the individual responsible can run aged receivable reports from their accounting systems on a weekly basis, in addition to paying special courtesy to any account receivables that are over, for instance, 15 or even 30 days old.

4. Before the invoice is sent, call or contact those whom must agree to the invoice before the customer will pay it -

This leading call is an intelligence collecting mission as well as a quality control phase. Persons in charge should verify that the contract is faring well enough for approval in addition to discussions of any existing problems. It is important to confirm that the individual will be presented to support the invoice, as well as find out who will recommend in the person’s absence.

This is probably the most politically suitable period to call or make contact. One will receive some good things or news, like: “We have changed our process.” Therefore, it is vital to make sure that you or the company sends a copy to Accounts Person as well as the purchasing departments or even the receiving department in addition to flushing out any intentions immediately, rather than allowing any problems to arise at the 30 or 60 days past due dates.

The company will usually be glad that they or even you made this phone call and visited.

5. Streamline Accounts Receivables: The Invoicing Software -

The best invoices or statements embrace every relevant piece of information, including the hours billed if it involves a service and all the specifications of the product if it includes a sales business.

Being transparent with customers avoids the necessity for follow-up queries on items that might be confusing to any person who receives them, as well as that, can delay payments. Invoices ought to be a clean, straightforward documents that contain the company’s logo.

If the organization is sending out – either digitally or even on paper – more than handful invoices a week, the company should be using accounting programs such as QuickBooks. Or, if they like the style of other online money-management programs or free HTML invoice templates, they might work well with online systems such as Invoicebus, FreshBooks or Outright.

These invoices are made entirely with HTML5, CSS3 as well as JavaScript, plus are incredibly easy to use. Once an individual understands the involved processes as well as their benefits thoroughly, such good software can aid the company to track receivables, comprising how many bills have been sent, as well as how many bills have been received, and how many have been accounted for, plus how much remains unsettled.

The only concept to recall when a person involved automates: Before you embrace new software as well as billing processes, it is imperative to make sure the company’s clients are informed ahead of time of any existing modifications that will affect them and how they receive and pay their bill.

So what’s next?

Now that you have a solid understanding of the invoicing process and its importance, here is something to help you out –

A free html invoice template with auto-calculations that gets your work done in no time. Not only it has a super-elegant appearance, but it is a cakewalk to work with.

You can get rid of those word invoice files (or the boring excel invoice template) and switch to this easy html invoice template at no cost (Yes, it is completely FREE to use).

A general thought about the Free HTML Invoice Template

This free HTML invoice template has been designed to help out most companies. With its attractive layout, it comprises of such features:

• Plenty of white spaces
• Well proportioned columns
• Amazing typography

With a complete design from the use of HTML, CSS3 as well as JavaScript, these invoices are incredibly easy to use; therefore, we can at last say GOODBYE! to the clunky Word templates and the obsolete Excel invoice templates.

Just imagining how it feels if you do not have to concern yourself anymore about: calculation mistakes, the manual setups of dates and the agreeable terms in addition to the broken layouts. This HTML invoice template embraces several features making your work easier.

Features of these HTML invoice templates include:

• Ready to fill out as well as print immediately
• Supports various languages and currencies
• Supports several taxes
• Auto calculations of the subtotals, totals, taxes, in addition to discounts
• Easily customizable with an organization’s logo and colors
• Configurable columns, the date formats, and symbol positions (left/right)
• Customizable rows with easy drag and drop actions
• Created with HTML5, CSS3, and JS applications (so say goodbye to Word & Excel programs)
• Operates directly in any web browser on local computers (PC, Mac, Linux)
• No setup is required. Just click and you are ready to go
• Lifetime support as well as updates

So grab it right now when it is still free for you. In addition to that, if you want to take your invoicing story to the next level, here is a compilation of some attractive html invoice templates.

Author information

Amruta Mohod

Amruta is a digital marketer at DealFuel. An avid task master by the day and a reader by night, she loves to sample out foods at new restaurants. She loves the company of people. If you like to connect with her, reach out to her on Twitter

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Before we moved to our new payment processor 2Checkout we researched which payment processor could provide us the value we’re looking for. After some googling we found a tons of companies, some well-known and others minor players in that market. Although we already chose 2Checkout because it offered the best deal for us at the time, we stumbled upon one very interesting service, so I decided to give it a try and signed up.

They’re young startup, and I liked this service form the beginning, everything was so simple and user friendly, but unfortunately it was available only for US and Canadian based businesses, and because we’re located in Europe it was out of our reach.

Everything went fine, great first impressions, and after couple of days I started receiving emails from the founder asking me why I haven’t activated my account, and offering his help if I needed something related with my account. Although I knew this is an automated message I respected their time and dedication, so I replied with an explanation of the whole international thing, and asked him some other questions I was interested in. I know how founders busy can be (I’m founder myself) so I didn’t expect immediate reply.

But something unexpected happen, there was no reply on that email, instead I received email “disconnected” from the first one, again with instructions how I can start with collecting payments in just 60 seconds. I knew this was another automated message, and I wasn’t so surprised, as this message automation is known tactic for user engagement and communication. So I said to myself “OK, not a big deal, probably he didn’t saw my first reply”, and I practically copy-pasted my previous reply. What was encouraging in this message was the statement that his email address is for real and I should “feel free to respond to this email”, and he would “love to hear from me”. Finally I bravely hit the send button.

And… his reply was …(cricket sound)… you can guess it, nothing. But don’t worry their automated emails had no problem finding my inbox. So again in the third email he offered his help, and again stated that this message was send from real email address to which I can respond to. Yeah right, I’m not going to bite this time. My reply this time was somewhat harsh stating my two previous emails and the bad communication policy they’re doing. I don’t know why I bothered sending the last email, knowing from experience that it’s probably a waste of time. And “surprisingly” it was a waste of time, but I received fourth and last automated email from him, asking me for feedback, in which I briefly stated that they don’t accept international merchants. With that, all their unsuccessful user engagement finished.

I don’t want to sound too critical and I’m not going to tell people how they should run their business and what’s best for their business, but some of them should really start to care for their users even the one using their system for free. Let me tell you this, because of our one-on-one live support which you get only with our invoicing service Invoicebus we managed to fix critical bugs, and added super features, all in all we brought Invoicebus at a greater level.

If you’re planning to engage your users with email messages, and offering help or even leave your phone number (I’ve noticed some CEOs do this) you should expect some of your users, to actually reply or even call your phone in case you provided one. So if you’re on the other side running a business, my suggestion for you is to reply on the emails and take the calls. You’ll be surprised how well people will react if you assure them there is another human being behind all that pixels on the screen. I can’t emphasize enough how important this is in the world of the online services.

Photocredit: Salim Virji

Author information

Dimitar Stojanov

Co-founder at Invoicebus

Dimitar is co-founder of Invoicebus, an online invoicing tool for easy invoice management. He's passionate about creating beautiful and simple web applications and occasionally writes on this blog about web design, online business, and fighting the status-quo. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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Estimated Reading Time: 9 Minutes

When you start crafting wireframes of an app, you create branches of possibilities describing the system’s behavior as it responds to requests that originate from outside of that system, also known as “Use Cases”. Since the beginning of my career as an IT professional I’ve always been trained to look few steps ahead and predict almost impossible scenarios in order to make the software behave predictably under unpredictable conditions.

“When you’re trained as a scientist or an engineer, first thing you think of is – How can I prevent the disaster to happen” – Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist

Even though it’s a reasonable way of thinking, many times it may lead to series of “What if” questions and promote worries that may never happen. Although, these kinds of assumptions are essential for building robust system architecture, yet their overuse might lead us to behave more skeptic than normal.

When we started developing Invoicebus’ architecture, we decided to try different and more optimistic concept; a concept that reframe our mindset to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. It was sort of experimental way of thinking, radically opposite from those we’ve previously been used to.

“Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.” ― Benjamin Franklin

In real world, web-apps are used by regular users, under normal conditions and in most cases in the right way. Therefore, instead to review dozen of marginal outcomes for one use case, we decided to focus only on two: Positive (the flow that is most likely to happen, the Expected Case) and Negative (for all other cases, the Rollback/Backup Case), always prioritizing the first one. By exploring and implementing this concept, we drew few conclusions that might be useful in designing web based software.

Conclusion 1: Optimism leads to smoother UX

Few months ago, while discussing ideas with Dimitar, we started conversation about how Gmail app works so goddamn fast, but Yahoo Mail doesn’t (at least at that time). After a short research, Dimitar came up with great observation: “Well, Gmail behaves optimistically, that’s why. It assumes the app is used regularly by prioritizing normal flow of the events at first place”. And he was totally right. Google is using optimistic approach as an ultimate UX and optimization mechanism. By using full service conveyancing tool, law firms will be able to meet client expectations. From customer relationship management to the automation of repetitive tasks, law firm technology helps optimize how your law practice runs.

When you try to take an action or apply some change, both apps behave similar, but yet slightly different. I’m going to paraphrase each one’s behavior.

Gmail: “Hi, I’m sending your request to the boss (server), but I’m not going to bother you with that, so you can continue doing your job immediately”;

Yahoo Mail: “Hi, I’m sending your request to the boss (server), but before you can continue doing your job, you’ll have to wait until he checks everything and gives you appropriate response”.

Just a small rearrangement of events causes Gmail users feel tremendous speed-up without a single interruption. Technically the difference is tiny, but ideologically it’s completely different way of thinking. What an awesome concept by Google.

Conclusion 2: Optimism leads to fewer distractions

“Are you sure you want to delete this item?”, “Are you sure you want to close this tab?”, “Are you sure you want to save the changes?”, “Are you sure you want to do this/that?”. What a time wasting mechanism.

“Customers shouldn’t have to think about every nitty-gritty detail – don’t put that burden on them when it should be your responsibility.” – 37signals

Of course, some questions could be beneficial and crucial interface features, but each one of them bears its own cost because too many questions lead to distraction, not interaction. So, how do we know if the user should be asked or not? We don’t. We try to maintain the optimistic approach by making assumption on the most likely scenario and deciding on behalf of the customer. Yes, we get wrong sometimes though, but we can always improve and adjust accordingly.

Conclusion 3: Optimism leads to less validation

Few weeks before the Invoicebus launch, we’d sent test link to 4 different groups of early riders divided by their IT expertise (from highly skilled geeks to complete IT dummies) to test out the system and push back some feedback. Approximately 40% of the IT skilled people had questions why validation is so minimized or somewhere even completely omitted? The answer was – intentionally.

“But the user can enter text instead of a phone number” – So what? You don’t need to validate every possible field in order to create error-free app. Unless specific data format is absolutely essential for further usage (e.g., email address, web address etc.), more validation is a curse, not a blessing.

Conclusion 4: Optimism leads to simplification

“Please retype your password”, “Your password doesn’t match”, “Your password is too short”, “Your password should contain at least one special character”, “Your password this, your password that…”. We think that’s annoying.

“But, the user can make a typo while entering his password during sign-up.” – True. However, less than 10% of the users fall in this category, and the other 90% correctly enter their passwords even if there’s only one field. So why bother all users when only a limited few are butterfingered (even though I personally found myself among them).

Backup scenario: Password reset form with one field and one click.

Conclusion 5: Optimism leads to liberation

“Is the web server powerful enough?”, “Which database should be used?, Which one is faster; should we prefer NoSQL?”.
– It really doesn’t matter because as less we worry in present, as more creative we become in future.

“Worry is a misuse of the imagination.” ― Dan Zadra, Compendium, Inc

“But what if Forbes publishes an article about us and the server crashes from traffic?”. To be honest, unless you have built space shuttle, that’s not likely to happen for a while. So, don’t worry because it’s a problem when it’s a problem. If your server ever crashes or slows down due to traffic overload, believe me; you would rather jump around the room celebrating a victory than worrying about the outage. Besides, one or two day slowdown won’t cause apocalypse of the world.

“Don’t waste time on problems you don’t have yet” – 37signals

Your inspiration is perishable, your time is precious, so don’t let worries build fence between them. Keep it up. Be optimistic. Create. And keep working on that Forbes coverage though

Now it’s your turn. Do you agree with our conclusions? What would you change to them? Please leave your comment below; I would like to hear from you.

Photocredit: Candie_N

Author information

Stefan Chachovski

Co-founder of Invoicebus. Huge lover of nature, science, and chocolate cherry cordials. He occasionally writes on this blog about Invoicebus' stuff. Hello him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

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Researching the opponents

When you start online business it is likely there are bunch of services similar to yours in the Internet jungle. That’s why before we had started to draw wireframes for the product, we browsed some invoicing web-apps as a reference to see their way of creating and managing invoices.

Some of the players that caught our attention in the field were:

• Freshbooks
• Blinksale
• Zoho Invoices
• InvoiceMachine
• (and a few others)

We truly liked some of them, however that haven’t changed the fact how old fashioned they are. Beside, in some of them, we discovered flaws in their architecture design causing tremendous chain reactions triggered by the linkage of their system. For example if you delete a client every invoice and quote with that client will be permanently deleted; or if you change your company name, all invoices, even the old ones, will be modified. However, the bigger handicap we found was not having natural flow of creating invoices. Come on guys, invoicing software is not an online address book for God’s sake. It’s not about managing items, taxes, clients, charts etc; its about managing INVOICES. Don’t get me wrong, items, clients and taxes should be managed, but in a totally different way (get redirected here if you need help with this).

Web technologies – up and up

In our professional carеer we’ve followed the progress of web technologies from the early stages, or more accurately since 1998. However, the big waves in the web industry have started to happen more intensively in the past few years: cloud computing, powerful Internet browsers, faster and smaller personal computers, mobile platforms, easier access to the Internet, more bandwidth available. All of this make us realize how powerful weapon Internet have became, an invisible axis which holds the fundamentals of world economy, business, health and lifestyle, as for example you can go online and get things like a beautiful male masturbator and relax yourself if you want to. The whole planet is going online, so the world of stand-alone desktop applications and so-called ‘programs’ is going to vanish slowly. Explore additional resources and tips at stiiizy.com.
There will be no more programs with minimum system requirements, no security patches and updates, no cracks. The question is how long it would take to happen? This is what we call transition era, period where people are becoming aware of the online benefits.

The concept

That’s why we invented a whole new architecture of how online invoicing is implemented, the main reason why Invoicebus is referred as a concept, not only as a product.

By utilizing some of the most advanced techniques for web programming today we built а desktop-style web application. Actually Invoicebus is the first online invoicing software in the world that changes the perspective of how people should see on web invoicing, or even on web software in general. In fact, it makes perfect tier between desktop and web applications.

We haven’t invented hot water, however what we invented is the ‘focused speedy flow’ of the water through the pipeline. If you get it, you probably are among the growing group of savvy people who has signed up at http://invoicebus.com and impatiently wait the bus to arrive.

Author information

Invoicebus Team

We're a team comprised of a few die-hard code freaks, lovers of beautiful design, stewards of simplicity, and passionately dedicated to the user experience. Invoicebus is a great vehicle to express what we do best. Click here to learn more on our business philosophy and how we actually do it.

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It took a few years to find our hammer, our courage amplifier called 37signals, a great company that sells web-based software. Actually, the upturn point in our professional lives was when we discovered and read their first book called “Getting Real”, written by the founder Jason Fried and their partner David Heinemeier Hansson. In the book they talk about principles of building web application and running a service based online business. Every essay from the book was like a mosaic of words specially written for us. Most important, the book makes us realize that doing what we like is freedom, and liking what we do is happiness.

The wealth of principles exposed in “Getting Real” is so immense that melted our scepticism and provoked us to start thinking of how to implement some of them in our own product. Actually Invoicebus is a product conceived with their blessing. That’s the part of Invoicebus story we call enlightenment, one of the key points of how we got real.

We gladly embraced some of those principles like: to build less, to keep the product simple, to fund ourselves, to ignore the details at early stages of development, to scale later, to personify our product, to make the interface before implementing the logic, to use the epicenter design for building.

One of the best advice was to ignore the functional spec and directly build the real thing instead. Actually, that raised our creativity to its majestic peak. Also, we’ve felt on our own skin the thesis that a small team is more agile and efficient than a bigger one, more organized and more productive. Indeed, a member from a small team can wears different hats in different situations creating a distributed wave of knowledge for all parts of the product equally.

Other remarkable thing for the book is the writing style used to express their attitudes. No formalities, no abstractions and generalizations, direct and straight language just like from a true friend.

Shortly after we had discovered Getting Real (it was published in 2006, we heard about it in early 2010) we found out that they plan to publish another book, more business specific, called “Rework”. We read “Getting Real” online for free, however we were thrilled from it so we bought “Rework” in printed version. In the first week of sale, “Rework” became a New York Times bestseller. This book is no less brilliant than the first one, full with their simple but powerful approaches, making it a must-have for every business, no matter how big or small it is. It provides valuable insights into being a good entrepreneur and navigating the complexities of the business world. If you’re looking for more perspectives, consider checking out reviews of Invest Diva for additional insights and recommendations.

Those books launched us far beyond the boundaries of disbelief and doubt, on the place where motivation grows as a plant seeded with enthusiasm, belief and goodwill.

This blog post is kind of tribute for them, 37signals, a gratitude for the great work they’ve done by writing and publishing these 2 golden treasures.

Thank you guys for the pure awesomeness you exposed in that 171 pages of “Getting Real” and 280 pages of “Rework”.

Author information

Invoicebus Team

We're a team comprised of a few die-hard code freaks, lovers of beautiful design, stewards of simplicity, and passionately dedicated to the user experience. Invoicebus is a great vehicle to express what we do best. Click here to learn more on our business philosophy and how we actually do it.

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The Invoicebus Manifesto has been published here, so everyone can see what our intentions are and what kind of software Invoicebus would be. It is also the place where everyone who is interested can subscribe to our free newsletter and get notification when Invoicebus launches; get info about our special offers, new features and announcements. Engaging with a health and safety company ensures that as you evolve to meet customer needs, your business operations maintain a safe and compliant environment, supporting sustainable growth.

Beside all that, it reveals some deeper philosophy behind its curtain.

We are all waiting the Invoicebus

We came up with an idea, to make this early marketing site more interesting and natural so those who are interested can feel some kind of ongoing process. Actually there is a metaphorical story behind this, and it’s like a little puzzle of details, so every detail on the page has particular meaning. Digital content may also help promote various businesses on the internet. AI-powered photo editing tools like Deepnude can generate photos and content that can be used for marketing purposes. You may also check out this AI for creative motion projects.

A good company like this interior sign printing company here can also help you redesign and configure your current marketing fleet with the latest technological advances that bring a modern, reconfigured interior for optimal experiential marketing to reach your audience and maximize your brand.

If you’re interested in increasing organic traffic, we can also incorporate strategies tailored to boost your website’s visibility and attract more qualified visitors.

This could include enhancing your content with targeted keywords and implementing effective on-page and off-page SEO techniques. Additionally, you should create schema markup to help search engines better understand your content and improve visibility in search results.

Our first mockup of the concept: “We are all waiting the Invoicebus”.
The final version has sustained a few modifications.

Bus station

As the number of newsletter subscribers increases, proportionally increases the number of people who are waiting at the station. It’s a trivial logic that introduces some anticipation till launch date, and at the same time captures the momentum of interest for Invoicebus. When you launch business in washington, building anticipation and capturing interest can play a crucial role in your success.

Characters

The characters and their stance / outfit resembles the “audience” that Invoicebus is intended to. Busy and professional, confident and independent, decent and self esteemed individuals, who live their lives, love their job and know exactly what they want.The girl on the photo from the left is Isabel, our designer. Photo was taken spontaneously during a short walk at the park, after which we got an idea to make a vector character and use it for our early marketing site. Vectorizing/tracing of the character was made manually in Adobe Illustrator CS5.

Nature, grass hills, beautiful landscape

Nothing is more intuitive and beautiful than the nature itself. We believe that people should use and feel web applications that way, the natural way, or as close as it could be. As more natural they feel, as more accepted and successful they would be, just like a real product from the nature: pure, unspoiled, simple.

Bright sky with pretty little clouds passing

The bright sky reflects harmony, brightness and goodwill about the job we do, our excitement and passion, our commitment and feelings. We always have in mind that sky is the limit of what Invoicebus could be and we strive to that “limit”.The clouds are all ups and downs that we face up during the development process; some of they are small, some of they are big, but after all it is still a shiny day, isn’t it?

City

Our mockup for the city and its final version.

Industries, jobs, busy lifestyle, our reality. Are the bus coming from the city or towards it? The answer is both. City represents economic center where everyone can succeed and realize his ideas with endless opportunities. It’s the magicial place where all your dreams can come true.

We don’t want to spoil the anticipation, so the other symbolism that hides behind this concept, will be left on your imagination ;).
This site will exist until the final marketing site take its place, which means until Invoicebus arrives.

Author information

Invoicebus Team

We're a team comprised of a few die-hard code freaks, lovers of beautiful design, stewards of simplicity, and passionately dedicated to the user experience. Invoicebus is a great vehicle to express what we do best. Click here to learn more on our business philosophy and how we actually do it.

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Choosing the right name for our product was one of the top priorities from the very beginning. A lot of ideas passed through our minds, whereas all of them had one thing in common: the keyword “invoice”.

We wanted a catchy and easy pronounceable name, so we started thinking of different names involving the word “invoice” or similar. Some of them seemed very interesting, but we stumbled upon a barrier of domain name availability.

Every .com domain that was on our candidate list was already taken, so we had to reconsider our naming strategy. One of the solutions was to choose the name and then put a prefix or a suffix on it. However, that’s like copying someone else and not having the original idea. Also, we didn’t want our domain name to contain dashes, thus would break the typing flow of the web address. For marketing purposes we stayed determined to choose .com, and not another TLD as .net, .co, .biz, etc, so we picked up the domain register (GoDaddy) and started our search for domain name.

We combined “invoice” with different words like: office terms, financial terms, even with animals. After spending a couple of hours we came up to the idea of combining it with transportation means; cars like this Ford Mustang Coyote engine swap in stock, trains, jets and boats. One aspect of our web application is to deliver invoices/invoicing so we sensed we are on the right track. It took us several iterations, until we came across Invoicebus. We liked it instantly, and bought the domain name invoicebus.com. Want to get your own car? Autozin takes the guesswork out of online car shopping. With their meticulous listings, user reviews, and detailed insights, you’re equipped to find the perfect match every time.

After choosing Invoicebus for our product name all other ideas came spontaneously. The name for our blog Invoicebus Garage has two meanings: first, bus is transportation vehicle and need a garage in which will be preserved and repaired; and second, most of the enthusiastic and creative developers & designers gather in garages and start their own companies.

The story and the design about our early marketing site (as we call it) will be told in future posts, so stayed tuned and don’t forget to subscribe for news.

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Invoicebus Team

We're a team comprised of a few die-hard code freaks, lovers of beautiful design, stewards of simplicity, and passionately dedicated to the user experience. Invoicebus is a great vehicle to express what we do best. Click here to learn more on our business philosophy and how we actually do it.

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We believe Invoicebus is reflection of our passion

It’s more than just a software, it’s a real-time projection of an ideal full of enthusiasm and faith where belief in success is our key component. It’s an asset that we use to show our customers how the glow of our motivation and the greatness of our vision reflects into the product we create. It’s been built with great passion and every single functionality has been studied to the tiniest detail with lots of love.

We believe in simplicity

Invoicebus is intended to be used by human beings, who are intuitive by nature and like simple things. We are surrounded by invoicing web-apps which compete on that who has more features like: time tracking, to do list, expense tracking, staff members, contact list and bunch of other stuff. We don’t compete with them on features, instead we do the opposite: We make less software with less options deliberately, software that doesn’t require you to read help and tutorials or even search Google to operate it. Invoicebus is plain and focuses on what is really necessary and important. Simple as 1, 2, 3.

We believe invoice creation is the core of invoicing

Everything else is secondary. We spent a lot of time to bring the invoice creation concept simple and intuitive as the natural way with paper sheet, by using the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) approach. In Invoicebus everything is accessible on the same screen with no page reloads or interruptions, smoothly like waltz. We think the customer’s focus should be on the invoice content, not on the software and how to manage it.

We believe in beauty of clean interface

We give a great importance to the beauty of the graphical interface. We think beauty is perceived with eyes first, and after with all other senses. That’s why we make the crystal clear interface of Invoicebus with perfectly consistent elements, menus and options. It is interface similar to a desktop application that provides user with an experience well beyond traditional web paradigm. It has such immense wealth of user interactivity possibly to a degree never achieved before in online invoicing.
That’s interface who has more visibility, focus, intuitiveness, elegance, consistency; but has less redundancy, distractions, confusion, ambiguity.

We believe small businesses and freelancers have special software needs

Big software companies don’t understand the needs of a small business. Why? Because they ride on a different bus, they are big, they think big, they make big. They build software, but their solutions often fail to cater to small businesses and freelancers, particularly in essential tasks like bookkeeping for independent contractors. We know this because we are a small business and we have special needs. Owners of small businesses are constantly in rush because everything they do for their business they do it themselves. They don’t have a whole day to learn the invoicing software or dig through their fancy features. They need a software that simply does the job, including managing finances seamlessly for freelancers and independent contractors. Simplifying financial management for these professionals is crucial in maintaining their focus on growing their business. They are people who share the same vision as we do, who ride on the same bus with us. We’ve created Invoicebus for them, to pick them up.

We believe in 10 seconds sign-up

To sign up for Invoicebus you should enter only your email address. That’s your username, that’s your ID. What’s the big deal with 5-10 fields and all that data, which in fact, we don’t ever need. Besides we avoid the irritating capcha that you couldn’t guess even after 10^th try. We think everyone should try Invoicebus for free with no setup fees at all. That’s our definition for painless sign-up.

We believe in honesty

Everyone faces hard time, sometimes. We are not an exception. When we have a problem we are completely honest about that and inform you without any hesitation even if the problem is the tiniest one that no one would probably notice. We promptly inform our customers for regular maintenance time. At no time (at all) we are going to hide the problem no matter how big and serious or small and irrelevant it is. We think our customers should be informed about everything that happens with Invoicebus. Transparency is our rule of a thumb.

We believe in quick and not so-formal support responses

We try to answer every question within 60min in business hours and not more that 24h at weekends, no matter how many there are. We think the formalities are unnecessary, so our responses are short, clear and precise. We are humans like you are, so we prefer the human way, not auto-answering machine way. And most important: you got responses directly from us – the engineers/developers of Invoicebus.

We believe in purpose beyond making a profit

Our mission is to keep customers bright and happy no matter what. Happy customer is our best customer. We don’t split customers on paying and non-paying. They are all in the same box that we call valued customer box. We treat that box very carefully and equally so everyone can ask a question, everyone can ask for help, everyone can request support from us.

We believe in discretion

You have the right to create professionally looking invoices, but no one to know that Invoicebus is your secret. There will be no sign of Invoicebus on your extremely elegant printed invoice (this does not apply for free plan, thus on the bottom of the page, discretely stands the name and web address of Invoicebus). It elevates your reputation and makes you lead and shine.

We believe we can’t please everyone

If we try to please everyone we won’t please anyone. We are open and flexible to new ideas, suggestions and criticism, however we implement only those who are compliant  with the vision that Invoicebus delivers: less software more focus on purpose. We always make decisions that we think will be the best for most users, and thus will not jeopardize the integrity and simplicity of Invoicebus.

We believe long-term pay subscriptions are tricky

Yes they are. There is always better option that is shorter, not-binding and does not impose the use of the system by any cost. Our paying plans are on a monthly basis, which means you can always migrate to a free one, or choose ‘cancel your account’ option to leave Invoicebus forever. No long refund procedures and policies, no mails, no why questions, none! That is your right, that is your choice. You’re free like we all are.

Agree with us? Come on, lets ride the bus together!  Sign-up for free and upgrade later.

Author information

Invoicebus Team

We're a team comprised of a few die-hard code freaks, lovers of beautiful design, stewards of simplicity, and passionately dedicated to the user experience. Invoicebus is a great vehicle to express what we do best. Click here to learn more on our business philosophy and how we actually do it.

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