This is a re-post of an article from a previous incarnation f this blog that was lost to the mists of time. Now replicated here for eternity!
CannyBill is a great bit of kit designed specifically for freelancers and those running small businesses. Made by Geordie’s (so made in the UK), this is one of the most user friendly and well tough-out billing systems I’ve seen.
The key tenets of their design approach seem to have been simplicity and functionality, as everything is well laid out and easy to access.
Registration and setup
It has everything you’ll need and getting started is a breeze. The registration process is quick and easy, meaning you are up and running in a matter of minutes. The free package is perfect for a new startup, which is the version I currently use, giving you up to 5 active clients, to which you can send a maximum of 10 invoices.
Additional licence types mean you can make the system grow with your client base and the cheapest is still a very reasonable £4.99 per month, giving you 10 per month invoices to 3 clients.
Setup is done off the back of registration and involves nothing more than entering your detailed business and preferred payment details. Simple customisation allows you to add a company logo to all invoices allowing that personal touch.
Built-in templates are available as standard that give you good flexibility for the admin pages, invoices and order forms, but can be extended either through downloading third party ones or making you own.
To be honest the almost unlimited flexibility of templates could put some people off and you could spend a very long time editing in order to design you very own billing experience – something I personally don’t feel the need to do. A logo and pre-defined colour scheme will suffice for me, but knowing you could get down and dirty with the design is nice to know.
New customers and invoices
Client setup is a simple process of adding their details to the system. Invoices are equally easy – choosing payment terms, type of payment, VAT and login information for their client portal. The latter of these is a very powerful feature, meaning that your client can basically login to see their invoices and payment details at any point. It’s all secure and again carries through your template/design choices.
The only downside that I can see is the inability to add multiple contacts against a client. It assumes that you only ever have one person to deal with at a given company. Not a show-stopper, but the option to link to contacts under one company would be a useful feature.
Reporting
Not a feature I’ve used very much or need to at this stage, however if you have many clients and lots of active invoices each month the reporting system can provide a quick snapshot or detailed view of outstanding invoices, payments received, outstanding payments and suchlike.
Conclusions
Simple is the way I started and simple is the way I will finish. This is a very easy to use and simple system – but don’t let the simplicity fool you. It’s high grade, professional and more than capable of matching your business’s immediate and future needs. My advice – try CannyBill now.
If you’re interested I did a audio version of this post on AudioBoo.
I am saddened by the masses of people who refuse to move with the times and help drive the community forward. I speak of course about adoption of CSS3, HTML5 and progressive enrichment in general. Just becasue CSS3 isn’t a standard and not all the browsers support it should not stop us as designers from using it. Otherwise all websites will look bland and exactly the same.
Thankfully I’m not alone:
So your pages might not validate to an experimental validator. So what?
Who cares?
Nobody dies.
Quoting the ever sensible and erudite Andy Clarke of course.
In short: use the tools you want, for the projects you want, backed up by the methods you want, make sure they work and only use when it’s appropriate.
As if we didn’t already know, but local media is all about the money. Long gone is any notion of journalism and actually forming a story based on research combined with opinion and thought.
Take a recent example I witnessed first hand with Jobaronic. Whilst attempting to get the message out there for the site launch I sent a press release to various local media publications hoping I would get some column inches.
90% ignored me completely and of the ones that did respond, they at least had the balls to say: Sorry, but that site competes head on with some of the services we offer so it would not be in our interests to run a story
or another who said advertising my site would be aconflict in interests
.
This simply cemented the commonly held view that incisive and relevant journalism at a local level simply does not exist. They don’t really want to tell what happening in the area unless it sells papers, drive advert revenue or somehow benefits their bottom line. It’s run by bureaucrats and accountants who want to maximise advert revenues and sponsorship deals. So this local business has no way of promoting itslef via the press in case I might compete with them.
Quality content is dead.
Long live banality!
Evolution of every medium: Technicians who invented it, run it; Technicians with taste, leverage it; Artists take over from the technicians; MBAs take over from the artists; Bureaucrats drive the medium to banality.
Bzzzt…fzzzt…initialising. Jobatronic version 1.0 is online and ready to get jobseekers and recruiters together. Albeit in beta form at this stage 
Image uploaded via Flickr
I can haz a new side project live in the form of Jobatronic. It’s job is simple: to provide an easy to use job site for jobseekers and recruiters in Gloucestershire. Frankly the main reasons for doing it are:
- Many other similar sites for Gloucestershire are frankly dire. They are too focussed on monetising their site through advertising and spend little effort giving jobseekers and recruiters a good user experience. I wanted to change that.
- It gave me a new framework to play with in the form of Jobberbase, an open source job board software.
Time will tell if it’s a success, but for know I’m pleased I’ve learnt a new framework – yet another string to the ‘ol bow! In addition to a new framework, this is the first commercial project I’ve done using HTML5. The base template was XHTML and riddled with non-semantic code and table-based layouts, so just fixing those things took a lot of time. Then converting it to HTML5 was surprisingly easy once you’ve got the hang of the naming conventions and correct uses. In addition the site has plenty of CSS3 to spice up the layout and give advanced browsers a better look and feel. In particular I make use of @font-face to deliver the cartoon font on headings – even works in IE!
The hope is that this site will wash it’s face over the coming year, which considering it cost about £30 excluding my time, should be fairly straight forward. So if you are in Gloucestershire and have a job to post or want to find a job, please drop by the Jobatronic site.
As is the want for most people, I’ll follow the herd and write a short article on my plans for 2010. If nothing else this is for my benefit – something to refer back to at the end of the year.
So in no particular order:
- Launch Jobatronic and hit the year one business case targets.
- Keep IFA Websites going, publish at least twice a month and grow Twitter followers to 500.
- Do at least 2 freelance web designs under the Sponge Project banner.
- Launch Investments Made Simple and get some money coming in.
At a personal level I’d like to try and stay healthy this year. I’ve spent too much time off work ill, with colds and flu, which is frankly getting me down. To achieve this I’ll eat more fruit and veg.
I closed down the official Sponge Project blog about 3 months ago due to lack of interest on my part. Basically I’m fundamentally lazy and can’t be arsed to maintain my own blog and the effort that entails (upgrades, monitoring, tweaking, etc).
Since then I’ve found that I miss sharing some things that don’t fit into 140 characters, i.e.: posted via Twitter. As a result I’m starting up this blog. Don’t expect anything exciting or regular, it will simply be a place for me to pour out some thoughts, musings and other silliness in my own special style. Also I’m very pleased to see my favourite font “Big Fish” is included in the TypeKit integration via the free hosted WordPress.com. .
