VentureBeat

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.

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.

Zoho, a company that is providing one of the widest selection on online office applications, continues to impress.

The company has released a plugin for Microsoft Office, and opened its APIs. The plugin makes Zoho what Microsoft’s online applications (dubbed Live) should be. It allows Zoho documents to be opened and saved in MS Office with a click (Word and Excel, at least; PowerPoint doesn’t work yet with Zoho, but will come). If you’ve got Microsoft office documents on your local drive and want them available online, you can get them via Zoho with couple of clicks. We sat down with Raju Vegesna, product manager, at Zoho, recently, and he told us about the release last night. He said Zoho will follow it up with a Open Office plugin.

The APIs will allow other developers to use Zoho applications. For example, online storage companies will be able to let users open documents through Zoho and save them back to their service without having to download the documents locally.

We’ll follow up later with more about Zoho. This is a notable company in other ways. It is part of private AdventNet, that has headquarters in Pleasanton, but 500 employees in India, and much of its product development there. You might call this one of the India’s first real product companies — compared to the “service” companies that come to mind when you think of India.