Best invoicing software tools: What's the best billing and invoicing services for small businesses?

Zoho Invoice offers a powerful yet easy to use tool designed to create professional invoices, manage automatic payment reminders and create pathways for online payments.

Although Zoho offers a free forever plan, it is far from a 'value' option. Zoho offers a great range of features to suit small but growing organisations that match (if not rival) their more costly counterparts. And if you do find that the free version is lacking in features, it could be worthwhile looking at Zoho Books for an inclusive accounting service.

Feature-wise Zoho Invoice offers invoice templates, email templates, estimates, credit notes, recurring invoices and automated reminders. This is all provides in an easy to use dashboard with a Google Analytics style tab system.

Sadly, Zoho is limited in the amount of third-party integrations it can support. Zoho can support the integration of it's internal software such as Zoho CRM, Zoho Projects, Zoho Docs, and Zoho People, but this might be too limiting for some businesses that require a range of accounting functionality.

QuickBooks offers a whole suite of accounting, invoicing and financial services for small businesses and larger ones.

Every QuickBook subscriber (all 1.5 million of them) has access to a real-time dashboard available on both a desktop and mobile, cloud accounting service, bookkeeping and full financial management.

With QuickBooks, users can estimate tax payments, track deductible mileage, create and send invoices, manage VAT, run payroll, provide multiple currencies and control stock levels.

Fully taking advantage of the collaborative nature of the cloud and its online platform, QuickBooks users access their user portal from any PC and utilise its toolbox of useful features without downloading any files and modify the dashboard to suit your business needs.

For example, users can easily add new customers, items or billed services with ease and create professional invoices from this database.

InvoiceBerry offers a dedicated invoicing service, offering recurring invoices, expense tracking, quotes, totally customisable invoices and multiple currency invoices.

What's more, InvoiceBerry will send reminders for late-payers, add credit notes and even send thank you emails after payment.

Unlike some tools listed, InvoiceBerry is designed solely for small and micro businesses offering a quick and simple dashboard and invoice creator with over 15 invoice templates on offer.

InvoiceBerry does offer a free forever payment tier, however this may be more suited to freelancers as it only includes three clients and two invoice templates. InvoiceBerry offers two other payment platforms, Solo and Pro, with Solo offering 35 clients and 15 invoice templates, while Pro offers unlimited clients and users.

Like QuickBooks, FreshBooks offers a cloud-based accounting suite providing small businesses with reliable invoicing software that can monitor tracking, payments and provide detailed financial reports over a user-friendly online dashboard.

Like with all cloud-based services, multi-device login is extremely easy, all you need is your login information. What's more, the data stored with Freshbooks is backed-up regularly, and automatically, making low maintenance invoicing possible.

What's good about Freshbooks is that all four pricing structures offer unlimited invoices, expenses, time tracking, PayPal, MailChimp and Basecamp integration (to name a few), credit card payments and totally customisable invoice templates.

Invoice2go offers a cloud-based Android, iOS and web invoicing application ideal for most small businesses. Compared to others listed Invoice2go is definitely more simplistic, and this is definitely not a bad thing. Invoice2go provides its users with around 40 fonts, 20 colour schemes and 50 background images, delivering total customisation.

What's more, this invoicing app's dashboard clearly displays which accounts are overdue, company sales, payments and profits. So, while it offers only one simple service - invoicing - this platform does it well. However, for those looking for more features such as online payments, credit notes and a myriad of third-party integrations, this platform won't be for you.

One thing worth noting, is that Invoice2go does not send out automatic overdue notifications which mean manual push notifications will be required. While not a problem for some, for those with high levels of invoicing, this could become a big task pretty quickly.

SliQ Tools provides a totally customisable experience for businesses and their invoicing needs. So this online invoicing tool will store customer, product and services data while providing absolute control over the aesthetics and brand customisation of invoices and business quotes. 

Businesses opting for SliQ Tools will be able to set up recurring transactions and invoices, add personalised delivery notes for customers, attach the invoice as a PDF and save it for later to be printed, exported or emailed.

Sadly, SliQ Tools does lack the sleek, simple design and user experience that others listed have to offer. SliQ users will have to enter email server, port and login details to use Gmail and other web-based email clients which can make the user experience feel a bit clunky.

However, for businesses wanting maximum creative control, this is a good choice for standalone billing and invoicing desktop software.

Like SliQ Tools, Express Invoice's user interface does look a little dated compared to the simplistic design of QuickBooks, Freshbooks and InvoiceBerry. However, for simply creating invoices and managing bills, Express Invoice is still a good option for small businesses.

Express Invoice users will be able to manage customers, create quotes, send invoices and process payments, while also provide good customisation. Users will be able to choose from 12 different invoice templates and then customise them. What's more, users will be able to set invoices to recur, print, save it and email it.

Express Invoice definitely takes an 'old school' approach to invoicing and while, in terms of features this is definitely noticeable, users will still receive a solid piece of invoicing software that can sync between PCs, smartphones, tablets via the Express Invoice app, which is pretty handy.