Zoho’s business offerings still growing with online invoice tool

March 28, 2008 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

zoho2.jpg Zoho has added another product to its constantly growing suite of online office and business applications — Zoho Invoice, which allows you to create and track invoices online.

Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna outlines the product’s new features here. It’s pretty straightforward: You add customers, products or services and a recurring payment schedule if necessary. Then you can print it, email it or export it as a PDF (see screenshot below). Zoho Invoice also supports billing in more than 150 currencies.

createinvoice.jpg

Overall, it’s a solid package, if nothing remarkable. That’s the norm with Zoho’s releases: The company rarely blows us away, but it provides all the basic functions you would need, and usually at a cheaper price than the competition. (You can read our coverage of Zoho People and Zoho Writer here and here, respectively.) Zoho Invoice expands Zoho’s already formidable offering of 16 other applications, moving well beyond the company’s initial focus on productivity apps. Vegesna says Zoho Invoice is particularly well-integrated with Zoho CRM.

I was surprised by the new pricing plan: The free option is close to useless, as you can only create five invoices a month. (Invoice Journal and Invotrak allow you to create an unlimited number for free.) Luckily, the other payment plans are quite affordable, ranging from $5 to $35 per month — the high end seems like a great deal, since you can create up to 1,500 invoices per month.

Pleasanton, Calif.-based Zoho is part of AdventNet, which is self-funded.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Thank you for the review. You probably don't want a billing/invoice package that blows you away, though :-)

    I was asked recently "What is your source of inspiration?" and I said Toyota & Honda. I admire their reputation for engineering, reliability, their kaizen philosophy of steady stream of innovations both large and small, and of course, affordable pricing.

    Part of the not-blowing-away comes from that continuous improvement philosophy. If you look at a Zoho Writer or a Zoho Show, they have come a long way in the past year, with a continuous stream of updates. Cumulatively, we have made a lot of progress, but there wasn't this magical blow-away moment.

    Once again, I appreciate the review.

    Sridhar
  • Anthony Ha
    Sdridhar - Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to get at -- that the significance isn't so much Zoho Invoice's amazingness, but rather the next step it represents for the company.
  • Thomas Parker
    Hey All

    I have been using the services of http://www.invoicera.com for quite sometime now and they are coming up with the new Invoicera with features like time-tracking, expense tracking, import function, and much more. Check out their blog at http://www.invoicera.com/blog for updates

    Cheers!!!