Zoho Corporation has made its online invoicing platform, Zoho Invoice, free to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that are transitioning from manual to digital record-keeping all while trying to dig out of a pandemic-driven economic hole.
Zoho Invoice includes time tracking, auto-recording of expenses, project billing and more than 30 real-time reports for freelancers and business owners. The cloud-based solution allows users to create send customized invoices and automatic follow-ups on unpaid bills, Zoho said in a Monday (July 26) press release.
The now-complimentary Zoho Invoice features streamlined payment collection, simplified billing, tax handling and more. It integrates with other Zoho applications and also with third-party applications.
“Our roots are centered around helping the SME [small and medium enterprise] community which has supported Zoho from the beginning, and we understand the challenges that SMEs have had to undergo that were onset from the global pandemic,” Hyther Nizam, president of MEA, Zoho Corp., said in the release. “We hope offering Zoho Invoice for free continues to help businesses rebuild and grow amongst challenging times that they face today and for the future.”
Zoho Invoice is available for free immediately on the web and as a fully functional, downloadable mobile app on all devices.
One of the biggest challenges in the invoice financing ecosystem today is what Hydr Co-Founder Hector Macandrew described as a “mathematical” issue related to pricing and fee structures.
Financing can be quite opaque with complex structures that change the overall cost of invoice financing depending on what percentage of an invoice is being finances, subscription fees, charter listing fees, various charge rates and more. It makes it extremely difficult for businesses to understand what they’re paying for or to compare one invoice financing offering to another.
There is another unfortunate reputation in invoice finance that Macandrew told PYMNTS can deter small businesses away from what could be a useful tool.
“Even though invoice financing has been around for some time, there is a stigma attached to it,” he said. “It’s almost admitting failure, for some reason, to have to get a third party involved. … Invoice financing companies are, in some instances, seen as a lender or resource of last resort.”
It’s a “philosophical” issue of the invoice financing world that can make the often-erroneous assumption that a small business using this solution is inadequate at managing cash flow.
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