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[Informal Survey] Who Uses Blinksale?

Another informal survey for you all... any Blinksale users out there? If you didn't know Blinksale is our slick little invoicing service for small businesses. It's perfect for small design and development shops (or freelancers). Anyhow, I'm just curious as to how much overlap we have between our two communities of friends.

Posted by josh Vip-micro on Apr 23, 2007 in Blab | 17 comments

Hoshichan on Apr 23, 2007

Mememe!!! <3333 I don't know what I'd do without it, honestly. Blinksale RULES.

gswd on Apr 23, 2007

I am a subscriber, but since I have no clients, I am not an "active" user.

epidemix on Apr 23, 2007

^ me too gswd

tamashii on Apr 23, 2007

I totally misunderstood the question because i am an idiot.

However, I could honestly see using Blinksale if I went more active as a freelancer.

seanhussey on Apr 23, 2007

I do. I love it. It's fantastic.

Hoshichan on Apr 23, 2007

Before Blinksale, I wrote up each invoice in Word, each time, and it was a huge pain. Now, I just load in a new client, create a new (pre-customized) invoice, and hit send.

More so, it lets me track my earnings (and payment due dates) far more accurately than I could previously. Makes running a business (and exporting for tax-time) a bit easier! I HIGHLY recommend it.

mickeyckm on Apr 23, 2007

nope. not yet. maybe will use in the future.

MacManX on Apr 24, 2007

I'm currently in the same boat as Hoshichan was before Blinksale and I'm considering opening a Blinksale account next month.

electricnet Vip-micro on Apr 24, 2007

I knew about Blinksale, but I haven't really used it yet, because I don't have any personal clients so far. It's probably something I'll be using in the future, though! It looks really cool.

mcd on Apr 24, 2007

I used to use it. I was on the $12/month plan, and it was great. Since I'm involved in my very first business venture, I needed something simple, easy to learn, flexible, etc.

I dropped the subscription to consolidate my invoicing into Quick Books. It was done mostly at the recommendation of my accountant, and while he never heard of Blinksale or had any basis of comparison to QB, I decided to take his advice and try to accomplish everything I was doing in Blinksale with QB.

I'm still on the fence about whether or not that was a good move. QB is ok... not great, but not terrible either when it comes to invoicing. Compared to Blinksale, the QB invoice templates seem much more difficult to use, and never look quite as nice. I know I could have kept using Blinksale and then just exported to QB, but I also like the idea of having just one finance/invoicing application to maintain. One place for everything.

For me personally and in my business (publishing and design, FYI), QuickBooks is probably the better option, as it is more robust and I am able to keep all of my accounting functions tracked in one place. However, if I was strictly a solo freelance designer, I would almost definitely stick with Blinksale.

crunnells Vip-micro on Apr 24, 2007

Yeah, I use Blinksale, and it's been great. I haven't had much need for it recently, but I'm an old member and don't really want to re-subscribe at some point.

It's great to know that it's there.

justG on Apr 24, 2007

I'm a subscriber (unpaid), but not an active user. I haven't gotten around to that whole branding thing yet, so I'm still using PayPal invoices. When I have gotten around to establishing a corporate identity, I'm sort of torn between using a service like Blinksale and a standalone app like Billings (or one of the many similar apps available).

webmonkey on Apr 24, 2007

Never even heard of Blinksale. I use QuickBooks, mostly out of habit - been using it since 199?. My accountant set it up and accesses all my records through it and it makes it easy for me that way - we wouldn't want to miss any of those deductions!

ADM on Apr 24, 2007

I do it all by hand, which isn't a huge problem but I did try out Blinksale and it was "product" based rather than customer.. this becomes a problem for me as each invoice I send to each client is different from the last.

I would like the ability to add products/services and then manually apply those to each customer I have, rather than the other way around.

Hope you understand what I mean.. unless of course blinksale has changed since the last time I used it.

Hoshichan on Apr 24, 2007

I think I might understand what you mean, ADM -- it used to be different, and each invoice was set up to be ONLY hourly, ONLY service, ONLY product, is that what you mean? Now you can pick, line by line, whether something is an hourly charge, a service (flat fee) or a product, which helps me a lot. That way I can bill hours and licensing fees (or stock art, or whatever) on the same invoice.

wotan on Apr 24, 2007

Just signed up - I'll give it a try.

miklb on Apr 24, 2007

I've tried just about everything on the market in this area. Though I'm a fan of doing a single task, and well, I'm still in between having an invoicing, time tracking, and project management work flow that, works and flows. Freshbooks comes closest, and with their integration with basecamp, closer, but I'd still like a GTD system that easily translates to tracking time for the projects (that can also be tied to email correspondence), then can quickly move to invoice.
I might look at blinksale again, as they now have some basecamp integration.