During my early days of self-employment, the tasks I habitually procastinated on where job costing and invoicing, even though putting off the latter could have jeapordized making the rent that month. It was still paperwork, and to this day, I hate paperwork.

In this day and age, a service like Blinksale is a welcome addition to the self-employment toolkit.

You do recurring billing, create invoices for services, hourly or daily bills and products, add freight and/or taxes and set payment terms including late payment rates.

After you create your invoice you either print it for snail mail or email a formatted copy and then Blinksale keeps it in your list of open invoices, and keeps track of overdue and outstanding accounts until you are ready to mark it paid.

The only shortfall is that I didn’t have the ability to label my sales tax, since here in Ontario we may charge 6% GST and if we do, we have to list our GST number as well. And the only missing feature I’d ask for is the ability to PDF an invoice before emailing it.

Best of all, Blinksale has multiple service levels, including a free one which give you 3 invoices a month, and the next level up is Silver which gives you 50 invoices a month for $12/month and even an enterprise level giving 1500 invoices per month at $49.

In short, it is quite comprehensive and a perfect fit for that lean mean self-employed back office.

Mark Jeftovic has been a self-employed internet professional since 1994, currently he is the founder and president of easyDNS Technologies Inc., the DNS hosting company and domain registrar. His personal blog is at http://mark.jeftovic.net