Applicom

Make invoicing automatic. Always.

If you like Zen meditation, manual invoicing is for you. You need to first write an invoice manually. That's by pen, or with Microsoft Word -- whatever. Well, three copies of it: one for the customer, one for yourself (to be stacked in the "unpaid invoices" folder), and one for the archive. Then you need to do your double-entry bookkeeping of this invoice, in the receivable account. Every day, you can go even deeper into your meditation while to go through the stack of unpaid invoices, and call customers to remind them. You might get pretty deep into yourself while entering the world of partially paid invoices. By the time you repeat this process once, twice, two thousand times a year, you are probably a Zen master and can work in a monastery. In the meantime, your company is dead. If you are not into Zen, you can spend a week or more setting up an automatic process, so that your accounting program spits out the invoices, adds the right accounting entry in the receivable account, knows when the invoices is due and sends SMS reminders to customers, and deals with partially paid invoices. With the second option, you don't become a Zen master but you end up with a company that has at least a chance of being successful.