By Rob Mason, robmason.org
About Rob Mason
By day Rob is a top eCommerce professional for the largest banking group in the UK. By night he builds standards compliant websites.
Sponge Project is a trading name for Rob Mason and is all about web design and email design with web standards and accessibility for Tewkesbury. Rob a firm believer that a quality website starts with the bits the user cannot see, which means he looks after the mechanics of the websites as well as the aesthetics.
Software Review – CannyBill
I don’t often do full reviews of kit I use, merely quick recommendations for the ones I like. However for CannyBill, I feel I need to make an exception. Made by Geordie’s (so made in the UK), this is one of the most user friendly and well tough-out billing systems I’ve seen. It’s been built with web designers in mind: Invoicing and billing software for businesses, web designers and ISPs. The key tenets of their design approach seem to have been simplicity and functionality.
Registration and setup
It has everything you’ll need and getting started is a breeze. The registration process is quick and easy, meaning you are up and running in a matter of minutes. The free package is perfect for a new startup, which is the version I currently use, giving you up to 5 active clients, to which you can send a maximum of 10 invoices. Additional licence types mean you can make the system grow with your client base and the cheapest is still a reasonable £9.99 per month, giving you unlimited invoices to 25 clients.
Setup is done off the back of registration and involves nothing more than entering your detailed business and preferred payment details. Simple customisation allows you to add a company logo to all invoices allowing that personal touch. Built-in templates are available as standard that give you some good initial flexibility for the admin pages, invoices and order forms, but can be extended either through downloading third party ones or making you own.
To be honest the almost unlimited flexibility of templates could put some people off and you could spend a very long time editing in order to design you very own billing experience – something I personally don’t feel the need to do. A logo will suffice for me, but knowing you could get down and dirty with the design is nice to know.
New customers and invoices
Client setup is a simple process of adding their details to the system. Invoices are equally easy – choosing payment terms, type of payment, VAT and login information for their client portal. The latter of these is a very powerful feature, meaning that your client can basically login to see their invoices and payment details at any point. It’s all secure and again carries through your template/design choices.
The only downside that I can see is the inability to add multiple contacts against a client. It assumes that you only ever have one person to deal with at a given company. Not a show-stopper, but the option to link to contacts under one company would be a useful feature.
Reporting
Not a feature I’ve used very much or need to at this stage, however if you have many clients and lots of active invoices each month the reporting system can provide a quick snapshot or detailed view of outstanding invoices, payments received, outstanding payments and suchlike.
Conclusions
Simple is the way I started and simple is the way I will finish. This is a very easy to use and simple system – but don’t let the simplicity fool you. It’s high grade, professional and more than capable of matching your business’s immediate and future needs. My advice – try CannyBill now.
