Invoicely (which begins with a free version) is a solid billing and invoicing software platform.
It offers a wealth of different pricing options and just about all of the features you'd expect of a tool in this category.
It supports multi-currency usage and exceptional report capabilities.
It may come up short when compared to Editors' Choice winners Wave and Zoho Invoice, but it's still worth considering.
Pricing Plan Breakdown
Moving up to the Basic plan removes the 10-item-saved limitation, allows two users to generate invoices and perform other operations, and adds the ability to track bills, prepare estimates, track time and expenses, generate recurring statements, removes the Invoicely branding, and accepts online payments.
Online payments are handled either through PayPal(Free at Apple.com) or Stripe in the United States, though other countries may have other payment systems available.
Invoicely is truly multinational, and you can specify the country in which you're operating as well as the chief currency to be used.
In the US, Stripe acts as a credit card processing service and also lets you accept Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments.
It charges 2.9 percent and 30 cents per transaction for credit or debit card charges, and 0.8 percent on ACH transfers with a $5 cap on the charge.
The other two payment plans, Professional and Enterprise, provide a custom domain for your business that extends to in-app emails.
And aside from both supporting electronic payments, they also expand the number of users who can be on the system to 10 and 25 "team members," respectively.
I was provided with access to a Professional Plan account for my testing.
A Dashboard-Centric Interface
Launching Invoicely brings you to a dashboard landing page.
This page displays an overview of your company status, including invoice status (paid, unpaid, overdue), number of customers, amount invoiced and received over a period of time you can set, and graphs of an invoice summary and income and expenses.
Also on the dashboard landing page is the main menu, which runs vertically along the left-hand edge of the screen.
This menu offers users the option to run reports, create estimates and invoices, manage clients, enter bills, and track time spent on tasks, enter expenses, and track mileage.
Unfortunately, unlike Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed($7.00 for 3 Months at QuickBooks Self-Employed), the mileage tracker doesn't actually use GPS to follow you along a trip, but simply lets you enter mileage readings, rate, and a reason for the trip.
Likewise, the time tracking facility isn't a timer that you can start and stop when performing a task, but simply a way to enter tasks that are billed on an hourly or daily basis.
A nice touch is that you can reach your favorite input and data screens in several ways.
There's the obvious one—the vertical menu located on the landing screen dashboard.
But you can also flip to the appropriate screens by clicking within the key performance indicators (KPI) in the dashboard.
For example, clicking on an entry in the Recent Activities pane will bring up the screen that created that activity, such as creating an invoice.
Clicking on the Accounts Receivable pane brings up the Report generation window so you can run off an Accounts Receivable report.
One report that's missing is a Sales Tax report, such as the one that QuickBooks Self-Employed provides.
But even though the report is missing, it's not difficult to set up sales or other taxes in Invoicely.
And if you live in an area (or country) that has multiple layers of different taxes that have to be applied on your invoices, it's not difficult to set this up, either.
You can also set up discount rates and default shipping rates from the Settings menu option.
These are good features, but I would have liked to have seen Invoicely integrate with a sales tax calculation service, such as Avalera, although in its lack of this feature, it's like many of the other invoicing apps I reviewed.
Decent Help and Overall Ease of Use
Invoicely does have some fairly decent help, though it is not context-sensitive.
The Help button is at the bottom of the vertical menu bar, and when clicked takes you to a screen that lists the most commonly used setup options and tasks.
Clicking one of these brings up a screen that goes into more detail on the task with illustrations and screen shots to help you along.
If this facility doesn't answer your questions, you are instructed to send an email to support.
There's where it gets tricky, though.
Since the vendor is located in Austria, don't count on getting a real-time answer, though they actually answered my single question within a few hours.
For the most part, my questions were amply addressed by the in-app help system.
The only question I had was whether iOS and Android apps were available, since I didn't see either in the respective app store.
They aren't, but Invoicely is entirely browser-based, so you can access it that way on any smart device as long as it's got web connectivity and a respectable browser.
Accessing Invoicely using Firefox on my iPhone, I found the screen resizes to fit the device and the app is nicely useable even without a dedicated app.
Overall, I found Invoicely noticeably easy to use.
The options are obvious, and I liked the way that you could set parameters in the reports menu.
Invoicely also has excellent export options.
You can export any of the reports, invoices, and estimates as PDF, XLS, or CSV files.
On the other hand, there's nothing about Invoicely that makes it stand out among the crowded invoicing app field like the way FreshBooks($15.00 at FreshBooks) stands out with its Proposal capability or And Co differentiates itself with its Contract feature.
Still, for many users with mostly basic requirements, Invoicely will remain an attractive and affordable option.
Cons
No custom branding for free version.
Invoice customization could be better.
Time and mileage tracking are minimal.
The Bottom Line
Invoicely is a strong contender in the billing space.
It is lacking customization features, but it has strong reporting and currency support functionality.
Invoicely (which begins with a free version) is a solid billing and invoicing software platform.
It offers a wealth of different pricing options and just about all of the features you'd expect of a tool in this category.
It supports multi-currency usage and exceptional report capabilities.
It may come up short when compared to Editors' Choice winners Wave and Zoho Invoice, but it's still worth considering.
Pricing Plan Breakdown
Moving up to the Basic plan removes the 10-item-saved limitation, allows two users to generate invoices and perform other operations, and adds the ability to track bills, prepare estimates, track time and expenses, generate recurring statements, removes the Invoicely branding, and accepts online payments.
Online payments are handled either through PayPal(Free at Apple.com) or Stripe in the United States, though other countries may have other payment systems available.
Invoicely is truly multinational, and you can specify the country in which you're operating as well as the chief currency to be used.
In the US, Stripe acts as a credit card processing service and also lets you accept Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments.
It charges 2.9 percent and 30 cents per transaction for credit or debit card charges, and 0.8 percent on ACH transfers with a $5 cap on the charge.
The other two payment plans, Professional and Enterprise, provide a custom domain for your business that extends to in-app emails.
And aside from both supporting electronic payments, they also expand the number of users who can be on the system to 10 and 25 "team members," respectively.
I was provided with access to a Professional Plan account for my testing.
A Dashboard-Centric Interface
Launching Invoicely brings you to a dashboard landing page.
This page displays an overview of your company status, including invoice status (paid, unpaid, overdue), number of customers, amount invoiced and received over a period of time you can set, and graphs of an invoice summary and income and expenses.
Also on the dashboard landing page is the main menu, which runs vertically along the left-hand edge of the screen.
This menu offers users the option to run reports, create estimates and invoices, manage clients, enter bills, and track time spent on tasks, enter expenses, and track mileage.
Unfortunately, unlike Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed($7.00 for 3 Months at QuickBooks Self-Employed), the mileage tracker doesn't actually use GPS to follow you along a trip, but simply lets you enter mileage readings, rate, and a reason for the trip.
Likewise, the time tracking facility isn't a timer that you can start and stop when performing a task, but simply a way to enter tasks that are billed on an hourly or daily basis.
A nice touch is that you can reach your favorite input and data screens in several ways.
There's the obvious one—the vertical menu located on the landing screen dashboard.
But you can also flip to the appropriate screens by clicking within the key performance indicators (KPI) in the dashboard.
For example, clicking on an entry in the Recent Activities pane will bring up the screen that created that activity, such as creating an invoice.
Clicking on the Accounts Receivable pane brings up the Report generation window so you can run off an Accounts Receivable report.
One report that's missing is a Sales Tax report, such as the one that QuickBooks Self-Employed provides.
But even though the report is missing, it's not difficult to set up sales or other taxes in Invoicely.
And if you live in an area (or country) that has multiple layers of different taxes that have to be applied on your invoices, it's not difficult to set this up, either.
You can also set up discount rates and default shipping rates from the Settings menu option.
These are good features, but I would have liked to have seen Invoicely integrate with a sales tax calculation service, such as Avalera, although in its lack of this feature, it's like many of the other invoicing apps I reviewed.
Decent Help and Overall Ease of Use
Invoicely does have some fairly decent help, though it is not context-sensitive.
The Help button is at the bottom of the vertical menu bar, and when clicked takes you to a screen that lists the most commonly used setup options and tasks.
Clicking one of these brings up a screen that goes into more detail on the task with illustrations and screen shots to help you along.
If this facility doesn't answer your questions, you are instructed to send an email to support.
There's where it gets tricky, though.
Since the vendor is located in Austria, don't count on getting a real-time answer, though they actually answered my single question within a few hours.
For the most part, my questions were amply addressed by the in-app help system.
The only question I had was whether iOS and Android apps were available, since I didn't see either in the respective app store.
They aren't, but Invoicely is entirely browser-based, so you can access it that way on any smart device as long as it's got web connectivity and a respectable browser.
Accessing Invoicely using Firefox on my iPhone, I found the screen resizes to fit the device and the app is nicely useable even without a dedicated app.
Overall, I found Invoicely noticeably easy to use.
The options are obvious, and I liked the way that you could set parameters in the reports menu.
Invoicely also has excellent export options.
You can export any of the reports, invoices, and estimates as PDF, XLS, or CSV files.
On the other hand, there's nothing about Invoicely that makes it stand out among the crowded invoicing app field like the way FreshBooks($15.00 at FreshBooks) stands out with its Proposal capability or And Co differentiates itself with its Contract feature.
Still, for many users with mostly basic requirements, Invoicely will remain an attractive and affordable option.
Cons
No custom branding for free version.
Invoice customization could be better.
Time and mileage tracking are minimal.
The Bottom Line
Invoicely is a strong contender in the billing space.
It is lacking customization features, but it has strong reporting and currency support functionality.
