It’s a big week for product launches – and a busy week for those commenting on the accounting software space. billFLO is this week launching its offering which it claims is the first low cost solution providing electronic invoice exchange for small businesses. Think of it as EDI for the rest of us…

billFLO was borne out of the fact that, despite much talk about standards and cross vendor integrations, there is still no fail safe way to transfer invoices from one product to another. The system is quite simple in that vendors just email their computer-readable invoices to the customer who uses billFLO to then import the invoice into their own accounting software. billFLO have estimated that a small business receiving 100 paper invoices each month spends $400 in manual data entry for those invoices – billFLO’s mission is to save the bulk of that time.

I have to say that at a conceptual level, the need for a product such as billFLO annoys me. The demise of desktop software should have, in my view, obviates the necessity to manually enter data – and under the new connected model it should be incumbent upon software vendors to ensure their products “talk” to other with no translation needed – as such the need for third part integrators such as billFLO goes against my “everyone connecting with everyone” ethos. That’s why the recent OAccounts initiative resonated so strongly with me.

That said, billFLO is living in reality, while I’m being idealistic. The fact is that cross vendor integrations are difficult with no standards in place – third party providers such as billFLO whose core proposition is providing these integrations have the ultimate incentive to get them right. In other words I don't like the fact that we need a billFLO but all credit to them for seeing the need and providing for it.

I'd prefer to see bilFLO automated so that users didn't need to take an intermediate step and manually click on import to get invoices into their own system - ideally once a vendor has been "approved", their invoices would come through automatically every time.

billFLO is launching with support between Quickbooks, FreshBooks, Less Accounting, Harvest and Blinksale – that alone gives them the bulk of US small businesses – it’ll be interesting to see what momentum their “digital bridge” gains.

Below are screencasts of billFLO in action.

Receiving billFLO Invoices:

Sending billFLO Invoices from Freshbooks: