Zoho’s business offerings still growing with online invoice tool

Venture Beat — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:31:36 -0700

Zoho has added another product to its constantly growing suite of online office and business applications — Zoho Invoice, which allows you to create and track invoices online.

Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna outlines the product’s new features here. It’s pretty straightforward: You add customers, products or services and a recurring payment schedule if necessary. Then you can print it, email it or export it as a PDF (see screenshot below). Zoho Invoice also supports billing in more than 150 currencies.

Overall, it’s a solid package, if nothing remarkable. That’s the norm with Zoho’s releases: The company rarely blows us away, but it provides all the basic functions you would need, and usually at a cheaper price than the competition. (You can read our coverage of Zoho People and Zoho Writer here and here, respectively.) Zoho Invoice expands Zoho’s already formidable offering of 16 other applications, moving well beyond the company’s initial focus on productivity apps. Vegesna says Zoho Invoice is particularly well-integrated with Zoho CRM.

I was surprised by the new pricing plan: The free option is close to useless, as you can only create five invoices a month. (Invoice Journal and Invotrak allow you to create an unlimited number for free.) Luckily, the other payment plans are quite affordable, ranging from $5 to $35 per month — the high end seems like a great deal, since you can create up to 1,500 invoices per month.

Pleasanton, Calif.-based Zoho is part of AdventNet, which is self-funded.