What Is the Best Invoicing App?

You'll get nothing more in this post than in the answer around time tracking apps, a wishy-washy "it depends on your situation." But even with that non-answer, there are a few things that matter more than anything else when it comes to invoicing, and if a tool doesn't get those right, the rest of the feature list doesn't matter.

Invoicing isn't just about generating a document, but rather encompasses the entire process through payment. Getting paid consistently and on time has a direct impact on the rest of your business, so the invoicing app you select shouldn't add any friction to that process.

The things that matter most are whether you can build an invoice quickly, if you can see at a glance what's been paid and what's still outstanding, and whether you can follow up without having to dig through your inbox or hard copy files to figure out current status. If you're spending time trying to figure out whether you've sent an invoice, whether you've billed for all your costs, or manually calculating what's owed, that's more than a minor inconvenience and is an actual problem that's costing you money.

Fast invoice creation. You should be able to pull up a client, add your time entries and any materials or expenses, and have an invoice ready to send in a few minutes. If you have to hunt for the entries to add to the invoice, confirm what has been billed, or re-enter information that already exists somewhere else in your system, that's unnecessary. The best invoicing tools pull from what you've already tracked.

Status tracking. Sent, viewed, paid, overdue, you should be able to see all of this without clicking into each invoice individually. A quick overview of what's outstanding is something you'll look at constantly, and it needs to be easily accessible and clear.

Easy follow-up. Being able to not just send the initial request for payment, but also send a follow-up email directly from inside the invoicing tool, without switching to your email client, finding the PDF, attaching it, and manually typing out a message, is a small thing that adds up. Adding steps to the process of chasing payments doesn't help.

Payment processing. This has become a real differentiator. When clients can pay directly from the invoice, by credit card or ACH bank transfer, you'll generally get paid faster. Credit card payments generally run around a 3.5% fee and ACH bank transfers around 1%, often capped. Whether you choose to absorb those fees or pass them to clients is a setting you control.

Integration with your time tracking. If you're billing by the hour, the best situation is one where your time entries feed directly into your invoices. Pulling billable hours out of a spreadsheet and manually entering them somewhere else is how things get missed or miscalculated, and a well-integrated system removes that step entirely.

The most common issue we've seen, and experienced, is choosing tools that handle one part of the process well but leave gaps elsewhere. You end up with time entries in one place, invoices in another, and payments tracked in a third, and eventually this lack of integration will wind up costing time and money.

When selecting a tool, make sure to find one that allows you to readily export your invoice history, client data, and line items. While it matters less when you're just starting, when you are years in and have all of your history in the system and need to switch, that's when users wish they had considered this early in the process.

And, same as with time tracking, make sure you're using a tool that securely handles your data and your clients' payment information. Established payment processors like Stripe have robust security and compliance infrastructure, while smaller or less established players may not.

The best invoicing app is the one that allows you to quickly build an invoice, makes it clear what's been paid, and makes it easy to follow up. Ideally it connects directly to wherever you're tracking your time and expenses, so you're not re-entering anything. It shouldn't require any effort to get started, just let you send invoices and get paid. There are a wide number of options, and you should be able to find all of this without having to pay a subscription fee.

If you're finding that your current system takes too long, requires too many steps, or leaves you uncertain about what's outstanding, keep looking. It doesn't have to be difficult.

That's actually why we built Track and Invoice. We needed something that handled time entries, expenses, and invoicing all in one place, without unnecessary complexity. If that sounds like what you're after, it's worth checking out.