However, to accept payments by credit/debit card, PayPal Credit, or PayPal balance, you'll need a free PayPal Business account. You can create a basic invoice that you can download or print without even having a PayPal account. Plus, PayPal's name recognition and reputation may alleviate any concerns they have with paying you online. PayPal is one of the most popular payment gateways, so there's a good chance many of your clients already have PayPal accounts. If you're interested in accounting tools, read our roundup of the best accounting software. We excluded accounting software: while many do offer impressive invoicing features (like QuickBooks and FreshBooks), they work best when you use the whole accounting suite together, which can be overwhelming if you're just looking to send an invoice. We also prioritized software primarily designed for invoicing or ones that offered a robust, standalone invoicing feature.

We also considered pricing, but because we have a roundup dedicated to free invoice software, we expanded our testing to include paid apps.

We looked for apps with either unique or extensive features-those that do something no other app offers. When testing apps, we focused our research on hosted invoicing software (if you're interested in self-hosting your invoices, check out Invoice Ninja). Instead of creating a new document and typing everything in manually each time, you customize your invoice app once, track ongoing projects, and let the app generate the invoice. Those are the must-haves, but we were also looking for how easy the apps were to use-creating an invoice should only take only a few clicks.

For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.įirst and foremost, invoicing software should:Īllow you to create an invoice more quickly than you could in your word processor We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.

Invoice with word developer tools