Bill On Site Blog

Around November of 2008, I had a neat little idea. “Cell phones are everywhere,” I told my roommate. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could use those to conduct business? Like, pay with them at the cash register using software communicating over bluetooth, or exchange money between friends, or bill and pay for things like pizza deliveries, computer repair, or uh, snow shoveling?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Though 10-year olds may not have a cell phone so much.”

“You’d be surprised. What about landscaping and yardwork in general, then? There’s a large number of adults who make a living doing this on a larger scale.”

“Well yeah, then. That’d be pretty cool. Man. The future, right?”

“Right,” I said, and not much more became of that. For about a month.

I was sitting at my computer, tooling around with various frameworks for PHP and trying to think of a project I could use to really evaluate them, when it hit me – I didn’t have to wait for the future for that stuff I’d been talking about. I could write it right now!

I mean sure, the bluetooth stuff was a little out of my league. For that, you have to partner with banks and get them to install server software, then get them to roll out hardware at grocery stores, corner stores, drug stores – all over. And then you’ve got to convince people to download, install, and set up your software on their phones. And then you have to convince ‘em to actually use it instead of just pulling out their interac card. Clearly, this is a solution in search of a problem.

But sending invoices from your mobile phone? Now there is a very solvable problem that can pretty clearly make life easier for a large segment of people. And I can do that! Like right now!

See, there are a lot of smartphones sold in North America. I define smartphones as “anything with a reasonably capable web browser and access to the internet.” If you’ve got a Blackberry, or an iPhone, or if your phone is running Windows Mobile, chances are you have a smartphone. But the point is that a huge number of people in North America can access the internet from their cell phones.

The problem with using these phones to send invoices is invoice software on the web isn’t focused on the mobile user. They’re targetting people running Firefox, or Opera, or Internet Explorer 8, or Safari. And while this means you can do all kinds of fun things with Javascript and Flash, it also means that if you try to browse these sites on a mobile phone, it’ll take forever to download the page, and then you’ll be scrolling forever to try to find what you need to enter in the invoice because the designer was thinking about gorgeous huge 1600-pixel wide screens and not your cell phone’s 320 (if you’re lucky).

So I began Bill On Site. It is not a complex problem, it just needs to be executed properly. I’m putting a lot of focus on making it very, very easy to send an invoice from your mobile phone. A clear, simple interface, so it’s always obvious what you need to do. Simplified workflows so you can cut down on the amount of information you need to mess about with on-site. Small page sizes to ensure that pages load quickly and you’re not standing on someone’s doorstep for fifteen minutes waiting for some silly logo to download AGAIN.

If you do landscaping, or repair work, or really anything that requires you to issue a bill from a customer’s site, watch this space. Just think – no more triplicate forms! No more mistakes when transcribing paper bills! No more needing to manually keep track of who has late or unpaid invoices! No need to lease expensive billing equipment just to send a simple invoice to a customer and collect their payment. With Bill On site, you’ll be able to do all this from your mobile phone.

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