I am experimenting with an on-line information technology solution called Zoho. Today I invoiced a customer. First I imported the customers I had set up in Zoho's CRM, added the items I was going to be billing for, produced an invoice and emailed it to the customer. It really was quite slick. And my invoice has a paypal link.

http://www.zoho.com/ is the link to Zoho's home page where all of their packages, and there are many, are displayed and available for free use with certain restrictions. Only 5 invoices, only one project, for example. The CRM package is free for 5 users. I will cover more Zoho packages in future blogs.

Today we'll look at the invoice package. I had a choice of Service, Product, Fixed Cost, and Custom invoice templates and each choice had a layout choice of Classic, Modern, Plain, Professional. I created a service invoice with a professional layout.

I had already uploaded my logo so that appeared on the invoice. I was able to set up 4 payment terms and two taxes. You can configure up to three payment reminders to be sent at specific days late. You can choose to be cc'd on the reminders or the reminders can be sent to you and not the client. You could send the first two automatically to the client, for example, and the third would come to you for a telephone call to the client.

My invoice was paid today so I entered the payment.This invoice system is isolated from the other packages and most suitable for someone who just needs invoicing.

The CRM package has invoices so I tried that option as well. I was able to enter an invoice and this time I generated an email to myself telling me that the item had gone below reorder level. I had gotten the warning when entering the invoice and chose to continue. I could always enter a number of hours to keep the stock level up and avoid these warnings for a service.