If you own your own business, you’re not just the business owner. You’re also the secretary, customer service, and the billing department. Ensuring that you get paid the right amount in a timely fashion is one of biggest headaches of working for yourself. Superblock’s Corduroy billing system is designed to provide an easy-to-use, web-based billing solution for small businesses and freelancers.

Corduroy allows you to create projects, track how close you are to completing them, create invoices and request payments. The user interface is clean and intuitive, but there were several things about the service that I felt were missing. First, when you create a project, you’re supposed to set steps, estimate how long they are going to take and set your hourly rate. What about small business owners and freelancers who don’t get paid hourly, but rather by the project?

Second, it would be nice if there were a way to turn a completed project into an invoice instead of having to create an invoice from scratch. Third, the invoices produced are rather plain-templates or some options for customization would be welcome. Also, it would be nice if there were an option to import contacts from your email account-entering them in by hand is tedious. Finally, for projects that are paid by the hour, it would be excellent if Corduroy could either import data from another  time-tracking app or had a time-tracking feature included.

One thing I really dug about Corduroy was the option to allow customers to log in and view only their specific projects. This gives them an easy way to check the status of the project without having to call or email you. They can also log in to make a payment if your business is able to accept credit cards.  Other handy features include the ability to import bank account information and have it automatically updated, and three different report options. Also, Corduroy has a variety of monthly plan options and will easily scale up to support larger small businesses.

There are plenty of web-based billing apps out there. Depending on what you do and how you work, Corduroy may or not be a good choice for you. Small businesses that have multiple people managing the company’s billing will no doubt find the ability to have multiple users useful, and the pricing is reasonable.

What do you think of Corduroy? Would you use it for your business, or are there other billing apps out there that are better suited for you?

Our Rating of Corduroy

Tags: Accounting

Categories:web