The time for machine-readable invoices is now
As I wrote on Friday, FreshBooks believes in playing nicely with the other kids on the playground. The whole future of small business software is going to be about making it easy to move data from system to system. To all our sister companies, I’ll say to you that if your service doesn’t plug into the web of tools customers are using, you will be out of the game.
Of course, the Internet is still young, and there remain gaps in the web of data. Right now, there is a gap between vendors sending invoices and clients paying those bills. Clients have to tediously copy and paste the invoice details into their accounts payable system, and that makes getting paid slower and more painful.
Today, a service called billFLO is taking a swing at the problem. They have devised a machine-readable invoice file format to make it easier to import invoices into an accounts payable system. They hope to cut down the amount of time it takes to get paid by reducing the number of your clients’ manual steps to pay you.
I believe that sooner or later all invoices will be machine readable, but I’d prefer sooner. FreshBooks is happy to be one of billFLO’s initial endpoints because they are showing us a piece of the future. I truly hope that billFLO will serve to bring together the rather loose members of Accounting 2.0 to make machine-readable invoices a reality now.
You can receive billFLO invoices in FreshBooks…
…and you can send billBLO invoices from FreshBooks
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1:18 pm
Nice work Sunir – and for my perspective… http://www.cloudave.com/link/billflo-helping-the-world-communicate
3:04 pm
Hi Sunir,
We have several clients that we bill using avidbill.com and avidxchange.com for their AP. Maybe you could reach out to Avid and see if you could work with them for some tight integration too? Keep up the good work.
3:12 pm
[...] love the guys at Toronto-based online invoicing service FreshBooks. Chief Handshaker Sunir Shah blogged today about a San Francisco based startup called billFLO that deliver machine-readable invoices. While [...]
10:58 pm
[...] organizations and the amount of legwork needed to get invoices in and out of systems is horrendous. As Sunir Shah at Freshbooks says: I believe that sooner or later all invoices will be machine readable, but I’d prefer [...]
5:42 pm
Is there a way to have recurring freshbooks invoices automatically email out the billflo file format? That would be extremely nice.
11:03 am
@drevange,
we can certainly look into it for you! If you’d like to contact me directly ( billflo_ian….at….anoowa.com ) we could talk about how you would like it to work.
Ian Sweeney
CEO Anoowa Inc, Developers of billFLO
2:34 pm
There is, in the legal world, a format that proscribes a format for invoices that are easily read electronically by clients who use certain eBilling and matter management programs (like TyMetrix). The format is called LEDES. It would be great to have Freshbooks develop the ability to generate LEDES-compliant invoices, as many companies that hire lawyers require them.
Is Freshbooks working on this?
There are a lot of lawyers, I believe, that would prefer to use Freshbooks instead of the expensive, slow, dull-as-dishwater billing programs that now dominate the legal billing market (but are able to generate LEDES-compliant invoices . . .).
4:02 pm
Hey Connecticut Lawyer, that is a really good suggestion. I will look into LEDES.
6:41 pm
Connecticut Lawyer,
we’re familiar with Ledes and hear about it in-frequently. Is it widely used? (I know our attorneys dont use it, they keep sending us reams of very expensive, embossed paper!)
Ian from billFLO
10:28 am
LEDES is very widely used among companies that use legal eBilling / matter management.
These companies tend to be larger and use these programs to save labor time that would otherwise be devoted to poring over expensive, embossed paper bills.
If you’d like to learn more about a company that provides legal eBilling / matter management, check out TyMetrix (Google it).