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Zoho adds strong Invoice app to growing business suite

Zoho Invoice is a clean, straightforward, and flexible invoicing service. I gave it a quick spin and was creating estimates and invoices within minutes after entering in customer data and product lines (which also took only minutes). There is a good collection of attractive invoice templates for goods and services, or you can create your own.

It was easy to take an estimate and convert it into an invoice, and the app has a solid template system that sends form email cover letters with an invoice or estimate attached as a PDF file. The system tracks payments and has aging reports; it will send dunning letters and apply flat or percentage-rate fees for late transactions.

The app lets customers pay via PayPal, but it does not process credit cards as far as I could tell. It supports multiple currencies and tax rates, however this early version does not come with auto-populated tax rates for different states or regions. Rather than offer its own full business accounting app to go with the invoicing service, Zoho will "probably" at some point integrate with Intuit Quickbooks, Zoho's Raju Vegensa told me. Intuit, of course, also sells an invoicing add-on for Quickbooks, and offers Invoicing in its Web-based QuickBooks Online Edition. But Zoho's full suite of business apps may help to push it into the primary app role in a business, while Quickbooks gets relegated to the supporting, accounting-only function. It's a bit early to see how this will shake out, and if Zoho will be able to win the trust of customers in small businesses, where Intuit currently has a dominant market position. There are dozens of Web-based invoicing services, some of which we've reviewed on Webware (Blinksale, SimplyBill, Freshbooks; also the full small business suite Netbooks). Most are easy to recommend: They're simple to use and reasonably priced. So is Zoho's. But Zoho has more than just another invoice app. The company is building a full suite of business apps, which at some point will connect together at the logical places: CRM to invoicing to project management to HR, for example.