Labs

Invoicing can be a major chore for even the smallest businesses. Blinksale helps you manage your income online. The free version lets you create and send three invoices per month, which probably isn't enough, but at least you can try it. The main window is divided into tabs for categories such as invoices, purchases and people. You enter client details in the People section and create invoices in the Invoices section, selecting your client from a drop-down menu. The email invoice templates are beautifully designed, and you can also print them out. You can set up automatically recurring invoices.

Most importantly, Blinksale helps you keep track of what invoices you've sent and who's paid up. When you enter and send an invoice, it's flagged as sent, and you can mark it as paid when it is. A Dashboard view groups your invoices as open or overdue; for the latter, you can generate a reminder. You even get a neat overview of your billing history, and by totalling the balances you can instantly see how much you're owed. Invoices can also be filtered by client, project and subject matter, and you can export data to an Excel spreadsheet.