Steve Kaplan

Lifehacker briefly mentioned a company called Blinksale today. As their website claims, Blinksale is "The easiest way to send invoices online."

There is nothing revolutionary about this idea. People have been selling solutions for billing, procurement etc for years. However, this is an example of a great Web 2.0 app.

Note: "Web 2.0" is like the new "Synergy", an overused term that has been made up by the industry to describe something easily. It basically means, using the web for what it was hyped meant to be used for 10 years ago.

To get started with Blinksale all you have to do is create a free account and just like the Web 2.0 trend, they don't have to collect every piece of vital information about you.

Once you've created your account, you can begin creating invoices with their simple web form and then e-mail these to your customers. The app has integrated PayPal support so not only are your invoices handled online, payments are as well.

The power of the application really comes when it leverages upon the invoices you've created. When a user logs into their account, they are shown a dashboard that shows late invoices, open invoices and invoices recently closed. This is possible because of the integration with PayPal. As soon as a payment is made, the invoice's status is changed automatically in the Blinksale system.

There are also great features for sending out quick payment reminders and follow-ups/thank yous to customers. In addition, Blinksale makes it easy for setting up automatic recurring payments. And of course, what Web 2.0 app wouldn't be complete without gratutious tagging - they've got that too.

Although I said it is free, that only applies to the first 3 invoices per month. After that, they will charge you depending on how many invoices you want to send. When you do the math it comes out to around $.30 - $.50 per invoice depending on your account level. After all, these guys do have to make money somehow and this is not such a bad price - pretty competitive with postage.

What is great about Blinksale is it provides small businesses with an easy way to invoice customers without having to install any complex software locally and send out paper invoices. Since the app is hosted online it makes for great integration with online payment as well. Finally, it lowers the risk of a hard drive failure/computer crash that can be devistating to someone freelancing/running a small operation - they don't have to worry about losing all of their payment/billing records.

There are a ton more features and I would encourage you to check out the site. There is also a good walkthrough of the service with screenshots to give you a good idea for the app.

last updated 2 years ago comment