We’ve recently been assessing invoicing software for creative companies like us, primarily to automate some of the manual tasks we have to do here involving recurring domain and hosting invoicing, as well as tracking project time to check we are hitting our targets.
This post isn’t a review of any particular software out there that does any of these things – no, rather it’s about the quality of the software available overall in this area.
As a creative agency, we have looked at all types of solutions, from simple invoice-and-email software right up to complete creative agency automation solutions. And one thing that struck us immediately about the “complete solutions” is how awful most of them are!
All style, no substance
Sure, they have lovely websites advertising them – all Flash graphics and “built by designers for designers”-style happy talk, but whoa! Wait till you see the software! It’s back to 1995 we go, with clunky, old-fashioned interfaces and completely non-intuitive design. Building software on the back of Filemaker Pro is fine I suppose, but… actually, no it ISN’T fine! Hell this is 2009. Times have most definitely moved on. It’s not good enough any more.
So we’re severely underwhelmed by download-and-install solutions. Let’s look at online “software-as-a-service” (SaaS) solutions instead. Perplexingly enough, a lot of the products out there that claim to offer it all online are simply bad online versions of the above, now with an associated monthly fee and the same clunky, old-style interfaces, but even slower.
SaaS has its advantages, of course, but speed isn’t one of them, and frankly if we’re going to pay a subscription for something and put up with delays every time we hit “enter” (sorry, “submit”), we want it to be fantastic to use. We want it to wow us. But in trying to “keep up with the Joneses”, some of these struggling business software companies have actually gone backwards as they career, panicked, into the Web 2.0 world.
We did come across one or two fully fledged agency/service management suites which seemed to have been built since Windows 98 finally disappeared, but they sadly seemed to have relatively few users (think empty forums, glaring bugs that nobody had blogged about anywhere).
Keeping it simple
So having spent some time assessing the whole marketplace, we narrowed our search down to online, stripped-down invoicing software. This type of software, we found, generally has a user base that is active and enthusiastic, and offers modern, clean and simple functionality, customisation, and the addition of features that offline software can’t easily offer (things like client logins, the ability to pay invoices online, iPhone access).
We’re still at the final assessing stage, but it has become abundantly clear that any one of this type of solution – which are nearly all from lean, hungry “Web 2.0″ start-ups – will do 80% of what we want for 20% of the effort involved with trying to master one of their old-school competitors.
And as a lean, hungry web agency ourselves, that’s just the type of software that pushes our buttons.
Tags: business software, SaaS, usability, Web 2.0