Invoicing our web design clients made us re-think billing software

As a web developer for over 10 years, one of our most time consuming tasks in trying to run a small business was billing clients. We quickly discovered that in the real world, if you bill a customer $19.95 for hosting, they may send you $20, 13 days late after you have already sent the next invoice, all while you have 3 open projects for that customer and their domain renewal is approaching.

In our office, multiple web designers work on many projects at a time and keeping billing simple for us was just as important as keeping it simple for our customers. We wanted to get paid on-time and to do so, our customers needed to get billed on-time, accurately and in a manner they could understand.

Like many other business we started with Excel and grew into Quickbooks. We messed around with some online tools, but ultimately it was difficult to see how we were ever going to scale our billing as we grew. Quick Books wasn't cutting it. Sure, it was fine for keeping the books, but for invoicing clients, it just didn't do what we needed it to do.

Managing invoices online was the primary goal when we decided to build CompassBill. We actually developed two online billing solutions for our own use before we embarked on CompassBill. Each iteration helped us to determine which features we wanted and which we didn't.

I like to think that we designed it to meet the demands of our toughest clients. We just always seemed to have the hand full of people that did quirky things that we couldn't fit into a billing system. So, CompassBill was really beyond just another way to send an invoice, it was a think tank project in usability, diving into the scenarios we faced on a daily basis.

You think when you build a payment screen that the customer will pay what they owe, but they don't always do that. Sometimes a line item charge is disputed. Sometimes it was easier for the customer to mail $20 than $19.95. While I won't turn down a free nickel, that free nickel made a big mess of the billing system. Sometimes, you get half a payment and sometimes you don't get any payment. Sometimes you let something slide until next billing period and sometimes you owe the customer some credit for a mistake. Sometimes employees forget to put their time in before the invoice goes out.

As a web developer and business owner, I wanted to focus on building web sites and keeping customers happy. Building an invoicing system that could automate as much as possible was a priority with CompassBill and we continue to improve those aspects as we get customer feedback. When billing is under control, there is an immediate calming feeling that things are progressing. Even better, customers pay faster when things are consistent and easy to understand.

www.compassbill.net