I recently got an email advising me to check out GoToBilling.com. The email wasn’t long but just a short note advising me to check it out – I’m glad I did.
GoToBilling.com is for those smaller businesses, mainly service oriented that have basic payment (receive and send) needs. Maybe you’re a contractor, PR professional, graphic artist or someone else whose needs are basic. In fact maybe you’ve been using PayPal for some time – GoToBilling.com is something for you to consider.
It has a wide range of payment options so you can receive and send payments through a variety of methods. Solutions include for paying employees and vendors; recurring payments and shopping cart and gateway offerings.
The marketing and CRM functions is what makes GoToBilling.com quite interesting as compared to PayPal. It’s one thing to be able to send and receive money, but taking things up a notch and being able to get new customers or sell to the ones you have is a bit different and takes more than simple invoicing.
GoToBilling.com’s marketing feature enables you to send email marketing campaigns to customers and track their responses. The CRM feature is a bit light, but not surprising. Many companies offer “CRM” which means passive tracking of customer information – as GoToBilling.com does with its CRM module.
Their web site reads, “Enter a lead. Add meetings, calls and notes. Once the lead becomes a customer, click a button and convert the lead to a contact and/or an account. Pull up a contact and see everything that has happened with that contact. Meetings held, phone call records, emails sent, notes, projects, documents and more.”
There is more to the CRM component, but this gives you an idea of how it works.
Another component of GoToBilling.com is its gift card feature, which lets you send a customer a gift card via email or have gift cards printed.
Pricing ranges from $30 – $130 per month, depending on the users you’ll have and invoices you want to send. I was impressed that there are NO merchant account fees of any kind with GoToBilling.com – only a transaction fee.
My only caution would be that since there is no “about us” page about the company, you really are not sure who is behind this service. Putting your confidential information and your business’ money in the hands of any company is something to carefully consider, but much more a company that you don’t know about.
Quickbooks, Peachtree and Microsoft Accounting have various degrees of the features of GoToBilling.com integrated into their software and definitely available as 3rd party add-ons. PayPal has the payment / invoice features but none of the marketing and CRM features.
As you look for a solution for your service – you have many choices. Choose the solution that works for you and is best for your business growth.
Smallbiztechnology.com, published by