Business 101 – Getting paid

One of the biggest problems that most small businesses face in this day and age, scratch that, throughout time, has been that of getting paid for their work. Billing or invoicing, whatever you want to call it, is one of the most important things you have to keep track of as a small business person. As an entrepreneur your goal is to collect as much money as you possibly can within a resonable amount of time. What this means is that it is your job to make sure you get paid for the work you are doing.As a small business owner, I think that the current solutions out there leave much to be desired in the way of functionality. There are two basic choices for invoicing for small businesses: Quickbooks (or its equivalent desktop software) or an online tool like BlinkSale. There is one major problem with all of these options (and this isn’t a jab at blinksale btw, i think their stuff is great), they only function in one direction. What I mean by this is the following: the invoicing process is only accessible to the business owner, the client can’t see their invoices unless they are sent to them. It becomes a one way street, with the service provider controlling the gates to the information.So with this in mind, you might be asking yourself: “well what the heck are you doing complaining, we don’t see you doing anything about it?” Well thats exactly what I am trying to do, so as of this moment I am announcing infiniBill, my new invoicing service. It is still in private beta, but you can go on over and enter your name and email, and I will send you the details on how you can sign up.Why should you care about infinibill? Aside from the fact that you’re reading my blog, thus meaning you are either interested in small business issues or technology, well it probably means you have money you need to collect from time to time. So with infinibill you can give your customers access to their invoices so that they can see them at any time, and you can track all of them quickly and easily from the web.So what does this mean for your small business? Well you will be able to centralize your billing in one place, create and send your invoices, track what people owe you and how long its been (this is the biggest problem freelancers face – reducing the collection time as much as possible), and much more.While I have your attention, I’d also like to see if there are any special features you are dying to see in a billing solution. So if you think of anything let me know. In the mean time, get on the mailing list: infinibill.com