If you’re a freelancer or own your own small business, keeping track of your invoices is a vital. How else will you know who’s paid up and who needs a little bit of extra persuasion? There are a plethora of online services that attempt to make this chore a little bit easier. When we came across CurdBee, we wondered what its developers were doing to make it stand out from the pack.
To find out, we interviewed Lakshan Perera of Vesess, the company behind CurdBee. Here’s what we found out about CurdBee, including the origins of the name and why he thinks CurdBee rocks the online billing app world:
Q) What sets CurdBee apart from the other billing apps out there?
“Major differentiation factor for CurdBee from other online billing apps is its simple and intuitive user experience. Our standard account is completely free. Free account is not a demo account, you could use it for your real business needs without any restrictions. You could send an unlimited number of invoices, and manage any number of clients.”
“Also, CurdBee makes your life easy by supporting multiple currencies and online payment integrations using PayPal & Google Checkout. We’ve been in operation for almost one year now and we have a nice niche of passionate users. So it is a serious business for us.”
Q) You mentioned that you have a new version of CurdBee. What changes have you made? What new features have you added?
“Most important is the introduction of the PRO edition, which adds bunch of cool and important features for just $5 per month. Features included in PRO accounts are added security with SSL encryption, PDF support, Reminders & Thank You notes, Fully customizable email templates and zero CurdBee branding.
Also, another major step we have taken in this release is making the app easy to customize and extend. As a start, we have introduced 3 extensions – Recurring Billing, Estimates and 2Checkout gateway integration. You can enable any of these extensions for just $5 per month.Unlike the other web apps, where you have to pay for the package, we introduced a “*pay only for what you use*” approach.”
Q) Why did you choose the name “CurdBee?”
“CurdBee’s name was coined from our Sri Lankan context. Here we use Curd to signify purity and Bee to signify smartness and effectiveness. We felt the name CurdBee would be striking and easy to remember.”
Q) What inspired you to create CurdBee?
“As designers and developers, we like to get things done in a short period of time with minimal hassle. Sending out invoices and collecting payments was the most cumbersome job we had on our hands. Almost all invoicing apps we tried were either overly complex or restrictive to use for day to day business needs. That’s why we thought of scratching our own itch by writing CurdBee. Along the way we felt it could help others with similar needs as ours.”
Q) Where do you plan to take CurdBee in the future?
“We want to make CurdBee the comprehensive tool for managing a business for startups and freelancers. Being a startup, we know what the real needs and concerns of this niche are. We are currently working on adding support for Time Tracking for the next release of CurdBee.”
Our review:
CurdBee does have a simple, attractive user interface. Entering clients into the system is easy, although being able to import them would be easier. Creating invoices is a piece of cake, and I love how CurdBee saves the line items on your invoice so that you don’t have to re-type them each time you create a new invoice.
CurdBee also makes it easy to create professional invoices customized with your business name and logo. You can track payments, and the activity screen shows recent invoices sent and payments received, so you can keep an eye on who owes you money.
This is not a complete accounting package, but many freelancers and start-ups don’t want a web-based accounting program, anyway. Why pay more for functionality you don’t need? CurdBee offers an extremely useful service for an awesome price-you really can’t beat a fully functioning invoicing program for free, and the Pro accounts are only $5 a month.
Our Rating of CurdBee
Categories:web
Tool of the Day and Exclusive Interview: CurdBee – Take The Sting Out Of Invoicing http://ow.ly/7O1q
RT @usefultools Tool of the Day and Exclusive Interview: CurdBee – Take The Sting Out Of Invoicing http://ow.ly/7O1q
Checkout @usefultools – Tool of the Day and Exclusive Interview on CurdBee – http://ow.ly/7O1q
RT @laktek: Checkout @usefultools – Tool of the Day and Exclusive Interview on CurdBee – http://ow.ly/7O1q
Hi
Nice application this curdbee. But I would highly recommend small businesses, freelancers and consultants http://www.invoicera.com and http://www.zoho.com. Both offer clutter free invoicing and Curdbee would take sometime to reach there.
Thanks
David
Hi David,
Yes, there are a lot of great invoicing apps out there. Thanks so much for your recommendations!
Thanks for all the suggestions and I was comparing CUrdbee, Invoiera and Zoho. I must say Curdbee looks much more solid and attractive compared to other two. Here’s my justification,
1. I can send unlimited invoices and have many clients as I want with CurdBee. But others have limitations in their FREE accounts.
2. Even when you compare the paid accounts Curdbee pricing is very reasonable as they don’t charge on the number of invoices/clients/recurring profiles. Instead its on the features. For instance, I don’t need estimates for my business, so I don’t need to pay for it but may need recurring invocing for which I have to pay.
I’ll be with Curdbee until you could find me a more attractive solution. Subscribed to the feed. Will wait to hear from you again in near future with more exciting solutions to make our lives easy.
I have been looking looking around for this kind of information. Will you post some more in future? I’ll be grateful if you will.
RT @usefultools Tool of the Day and Exclusive Interview: CurdBee – Take The Sting Out Of Invoicing http://ow.ly/7O1q
RT @usefultools Tool of the Day and Exclusive Interview: CurdBee – Take The Sting Out Of Invoicing http://ow.ly/7O1q
@yBCproduction It was our founder, Lankitha came with the name. You can find more info on this here: http://tinyurl.com/l85co5
Hey All
I have been using the services of http://www.invoicera.com for quite sometime now and they are coming up with the new Invoicera with features like time-tracking, expense tracking, import function, and much more. Check out their blog at http://www.invoicera.com/blog for updates
Cheers!!!
Hi Steve,
You know, I thought I had deja-vu when I approved this comment…and it turns out you already left the exact same comment on my review of Invoicera.
C’mon, Invoicera team. I can’t wait to see the updates, but spamming my comments is not cool. Future cut-and-paste comments like this will not be approved.