As a freelance consultant in the Netherlands, I often stumble upon
great suggestions for online tools on blogs or websites, often to be
disappointed by the fact the app or tool is only usable for US citizens
for various reasons. Fortunately, I am a tech news junkie, and quite able
to find good stuff on the internet that is truly global.

One of the most important tools for a Freelance worker (and for all
entrepeneurs, really) is proper billing. If you are a webworker living in
the US, there are several very good products at a very reasonable price
available. If you are in Europe or elsewhere outside the US, here are
two very good alternatives.

If you are a techie and run your own websites, databases and other
online apps, you might consider SimpleInvoices. MySQL powered php
scripts that do the job fine - including reports, pdf export and more. Very good. 

If you are not a techie, or you are like me (why do something if someone
else does it better and easier), Zoho has released a very good app to do
your billing: Zoho Invoice. It is completely free up to 5 bills a month, and
if you bill more than that, you can get 25 bills for $5. That’s a pretty good
value for money.

The app is, as all Zoho products, nice and “Web 2.0″ -ish, works good
and in any browser. A very nice option is recurring profiles, where you
can setup automatic bill creation for customers you bill the same
amount every month. You can even have it send out the automatic
created bill per email.

PDF and other exports are standard, integration with Zoho’s CRM
software is in place so if your business explodes you are ready.
Best of these tools is that they are truly global, meaning it does not
matter where in the world you are. Zoho’s Invoice is still in beta, some
minor issues exist but I already merged all my bill processing to it and I
have had no trouble whatsoever. I used to work with SimpleInvoices
before and even the layout of the bills is somewhat similar.

Servaas Schrama