Hi Lyndsey

I don't know whether it will do all that you ask it to do but have a look at invoice2go.  One of my clients uses it and I take a PDF list of the invoices and import them en bloc into VT+

"I had a client of a client who used invoice to go. Seems pretty easy to use, but I recall it being expensive. Although thats probably me just being tight! Er I mean careful!"

I just glanced at it - and the first thing that struck me under "plans" was the large text that says "Plans for first year subscribers" - which just screams "price increase after year one" to me, though I can't see any reference to pricing for the second year and beyond.

"Have to say - 50 a month isnt a huge amount, but for that software it would depend on how many clients he has and if they are different ones every month."

Indeed. The cheapest plan is £19/year - and that says 50 invoices, but since it doesn't state "per month" and the price is given as annual, I'd expect that to be 50 invoices per year (and only five clients). That's cunning - and very cynical.

Five clients versus fifty invoices per year is 'plausible' if not all clients get an invoice every month - but if they do, that would need sixty invoices per year.

So then you look at the 'Pro' plan, and you see unlimited invoices - but only 25 clients. That'll be fine for the hypothetical case of someone with five clients, all invoiced monthly - but for the sake of the extra ten invoices, needed we're talking around five times the cost.

For a printing business with around 50 invoices per month, I suspect not all customers order something every month, so I wouldn't be surprised if the actual number of recurring customers exceeds 100 - and if it doesn't yet, there's a real risk it could as the business gains new customers - so even the £149/year option would be unsuitable, or would be at risk of being outgrown, so then it becomes £399/year.

Ouch.

"Certainly if he is looking at either of the top two offerings I would suggest he just goes with the cheapest version of desktop software that either has cloud functionality also built in or he can drag out the information and dump it in dropbox once a month once he has finished invoicing. Desktop with a one off fee for perpetual use, tell him to ignore the suggestion he needs to upgrade every year. Bog standard sage would do this."

^ This.

Although with a version of Sage Instant that is now three (?) years old, this is exactly what my biggest client does. They bought several copies, and only one of those who use it is 'active' at any one time. When that person finishes, it is backed up to Dropbox, and someone else picks up the baton, restoring into their copy.

Invoices are emailed out once per month, and it's set up so that at a click of a button a CSV file of the invoices is emailed to me. I'm on the wrong computer to check in Sage itself, but I've just glanced in my email at June's CSV file - 250 lines (i.e. invoices).

And it all works perfectly.