KCS Kiesel Computer Systems

Our journey to easybill

In the beginning there was fire, it says in the Bible. But it wasn’t quite that bad. At first, we still sent our recurring invoices using Word and Excel and then as a mail merge, which over time simply led to problems—whether it was limitations in Excel or blocks when sending the growing number of emails. So in 2016, I started looking for a web-based product that would allow us to create our invoices quickly and easily and send them on a scheduled basis.

Despite a long search, the wrong decision

After what feels like a million tests of different products, we ended up sticking with Fastbill. Up until last year, everything also worked smoothly, but now it has been taking the support team since August 2023 to provide a solution to our problem. The issue is that recurring invoices keep using the wrong document templates, or suddenly “Quotation” appears instead of “Invoice” on the invoices that are sent out.

After the faulty send-out, we had to painstakingly handle each invoice individually, select the document template again and resend it, which of course led to confusion and follow-up questions from our customers and thus required a significantly higher time investment for us than it ultimately delivered in productivity. Since August, we’ve been fobbed off in support emails. It gives us the impression that taking money is okay, but providing support is rather not.

Switching to easybill

Unfortunately, I don’t know why we didn’t come across easybill sooner, but I’ll probably be annoyed about it for a long time. It started with a scheduled phone appointment with easybill Support.

We mainly work with recurring invoices, and a very important point for us is various placeholders in the forms. In an almost two-hour phone call, in which support took a lot of time for our many questions, we went through a recurring invoice from start to finish together. The design of the invoice form is very user-friendly and customer-oriented, as everything is described quite well. My questions regarding resending documents, adjusting the texts on the invoice, or even adapting the document template to match my letterhead were resolved within a few minutes—more like seconds—and were also very easy for me to follow.

The SEPA direct debit feature was also a very important point for us, as we collect our sent invoices by direct debit on a key date. This was also very easy, as you can generate individual invoices as a SEPA file or an entire batch with up to 250 records within one SEPA file. The most important point for us, however, is the fact that I can communicate with support not only via email, but also by phone if things should get urgent. Unfortunately, this is not the case with our previous provider.

Our conclusion about easybill

My conclusion so far: The easybill product offers a perfect environment for our purposes, and we will switch to easybill at the earliest possible opportunity. Despite a 7-day trial period, which we have been using since 16/01/2024, I already decided to switch on 18/01/2024 (2 days later). I can truly recommend the product wholeheartedly!