I think American companies are using the web more effectively than anyone else. Not only in ‘paid’ promos but otherwise as well. And while that is not a huge surprise, it reinforces itself when you get contacted by an American company talking about their products to you as a blogger.

What has also happened in the new business world order is that companies now could produce products for a worldwide audience- though some are more suited for that than others. The first thing that comes to mind while talking about ‘global audience’, is something that is mass and B2C. However, some companies have taken the initiative and have created products that could be used by a more niche audience.

I have covered Grasshopper earlier and now I present to you this software called Billing Boss.

Invoicing for small business- Billing Boss

Marketing a globally valid product has its own challeneges- and this is what Sage- the company behind Billing Boss seems to be doing very well. To me Marketing is Business and Business is Marketing.

Disclosure: This post is not paid-for by any means or form. They happened to write in to me explaining their product details, and I’m covering them because many readers seem to be start ups or independent/freelance professionals. I think the product is interesting. I have tested it once though to understand the features and not real life. Though I intend to use it – and will probably write more about it when I do.

This helps the readers and me in getting to try out a free service. This helps them- this blog is amongst limited pool of blogs with Page Rank 4, with 250 odd regular RSS readers and about 2k visitors per month.  And of course I love writing about new services or good ideas. Everyone wins.

Billing Boss is a free online invoicing tool designed specifically for businesses to create and track their invoices.

It is designed specifically for the needs of small businesses and freelancers, from start-ups to midsize organizations. Something that could be used across categories. Not made for any specific kind of business, though.

And they are using Social Media quite efficiently. Not only by pitching their services to influencers but also creating ‘assets’ for them to use . Like this demo video- where a journalist or blogger could just grab the code and embed in their posts.

It is a simple system. From an Application/programming perspective. But what makes it different- is the user experience and features that the web 2.0 audience expect out of just about any site.

Some interesting features are:

• The ability to export and import contacts
• Save and view invoicing history
• Data regarding usage in the reports section

The site is mobile optimized and can be used on the Iphone and GPhone as well. You could even share data with your chosen participants (a la google docs)

The product has multi language support apart from English- with Asian languages like : Korean, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Japanese. I could also see Hindi and Gujarati which was a major surprise. Gujarati is spoken by a small minority in India though the Gujarati community is fiercely entrepreneurial and are traditionally very savvy business people.Makes sense.

With multi language, there is also multiple currency feature (including SGD) but that seems to be more cosmetic than doing something dynamic (like converting local currencies into USD for example)

They mention on their site “Where we will make money is when we solve harder problems for you” leading me to believe they might have a freemium product but they clarified otherwise.

But I could see that they seem to have payment processing services on the site- and their ultimate aim might be to migrate some users on to that. It is not necessary to use those services- you could use your PayPal account in case you wanted to receive payments online.

So that’s about it- go ahead and use them- and get talking.