Bill On Site Blog

It’s a new year, and time for a new strategy. We value our customers’ opinions at Bill On Site, but it sure would be nice to have more opinions to value. Honestly, we don’t get much feedback these days, but that probably has something to do with the lack of customers, too. Something about Bill On Site just doesn’t gel with people, but that’s okay, because we have a plan.

For a limited time, Bill On Site will be available totally free! That’s right, no charges and no restrictions. Sign up for an account and use it to your heart’s content! The only catch is that this isn’t a “permanent” free thing, we will start charging again, just as soon as we’ve figured out exactly what it is everyone’s looking for, and made their dreams come true.

See, that’s the biggest news here, honestly. We’re not just making Bill On Site free for the sake of our health, we’re doing it so that we can get feedback – what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s needed, that kind of thing. We want to turn Bill On Site into an essential tool for your business. We want it to be exactly what you need. We need your help and your participation to do that, so we’re making it as easy as possible – free accounts for everyone!

Plus an extra-special bonus: Anyone who signs up during this “free” period will get a special permanent discount when we switch back to paid accounts. That’s right, you’ll get a special rate on whatever rate plan you choose forever, just for having been signed up during this period.

So go ahead and sign up now for your free account, use Bill On Site, and let us know what you want to see added, changed, or removed.

More news will be coming in the coming days, so keep your eyes peeled here for updates!

Amid fanfare, the cheering of adoring crowds, and a chorus of overjoyed small business owners the world over, Bill On Site was launched today.

Well, that’s not exactly true.

For one, the fanfare would have violated local noise ordinances, so it was cancelled at the last minute. The crowds lost their way, and the overjoyed small business owners were actually, you know, working like they ought to be, so they couldn’t be there either.

And actually, Bill On Site has been live and online for a week now, just with “Beta” tags splashed all over it. Some folk have actually managed to find their way to it, even though it was in a kind of “stealth mode,” which is rather neat.

But today, we’re taking off the Beta tags, rolling out the advertising, and actively encouraging people to sign up and try it out.

“What is Bill On Site?” I hear you ask. A good question!

Bill On Site is a web-hosted invoicing application that has a specially-tuned alternate invoice that’s perfect for your mobile phone. This means that you can use your mobile phone to send invoices to customers while still on site. No more blurry carbon copies, no more misread handwriting, no more expensive equipment leases!

Interested? Go ahead and give it a try. All accounts come with a free 30 day trial, and we don’t even ask for payment information up-front, so you can see if it’s exactly what you’re looking for.

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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And so begins the life of the Bill On Site blog.

Expect:

• Thrills!
• Chills!
• News and information about the Bill On Site Service!
• Useful information for small business owners!
• Possibly spills, but only if I can’t clean them up before posting.

Tune in to keep up, sportsfans!  Well, and even those of you who aren’t into sports. Just click on that orange “RSS Feed” button on the right, and we’ll keep you right up-to-date.