A Word template or a spreadsheet costs nothing to download and something every month to run. Put in how many invoices and quotes you send, how long each one takes you, and what your time is worth, and this works out the yearly bill you are already paying without seeing it. Free, and no signup needed.
The reason a Word template feels free is that the cost never arrives as a bill. It arrives as twenty minutes on a Sunday evening, as the invoice you forgot to send until the following month, and as the client you did not chase because you could not remember whether they had paid. None of that shows up in your accounts, so it never gets compared against the price of doing it another way.
This calculator puts a number on the first part of that, the part you can measure. It does not try to price the invoice you sent late or the payment you never followed up, which are usually the more expensive ones.
Count the invoices and quotes you sent last month, not a typical month, because a typical month is usually an underestimate. Time yourself honestly on the next one, from opening the last invoice to sending the new one. Then use your own hourly rate, the one you charge clients, because that is what the hour is actually worth to you.
The last slider is the important one. No tool removes invoicing work completely: you still choose the client, check the lines and press send. Setting it at half assumes a tool does the repetitive part, the finding, retyping, numbering, chasing and filing, and leaves you the part that needs a decision.
The final row subtracts a year of Billbooks Basic at $7.95 a month, which is $95.40 a year, from the value of the time you would get back. If the result is positive, the tool has paid for itself in time alone before you count anything else it does. If it is negative, your volume is genuinely low enough that a template is a reasonable choice, and this calculator will tell you that rather than argue with you.
Prices are per organization and every feature is included on every paid plan, so the figure does not change as you use more of it. Check current pricing on the pricing page before relying on it.
When people time themselves, the minutes rarely go where they expect. Opening last month's file and finding the right one is usually the largest single piece. After that comes changing the invoice number without breaking the sequence, retyping client details that have not changed, recalculating tax by hand, exporting a PDF, writing the covering email, and then filing a copy somewhere you will find it again in January.
Chasing is separate and worse, because it is unscheduled. You remember an unpaid invoice at an inconvenient moment, look it up, decide how to word the reminder, and put it off. That loop can run several times per invoice and none of it is billable.
Billbooks keeps your clients, items and numbering, turns a quote into an invoice in a click, and chases late payments on its own so you do not have to remember to.
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Want to make one right now without signing up for anything? The free invoice generator produces a finished invoice in the browser, and the free quote generator does the same for quotes.