What to look for in ar billing, how to judge it in half an hour with your own data, and a free plan to do that on without giving anyone a card.
Free, cheap and expensive — what you are actually paying for
The price differences in this market are real but they are rarely about billing, because issuing an invoice is not a hard problem and everybody can do it.
What you pay more for, roughly in order: more than one user, higher volume, stock and batch tracking, return preparation, e-invoicing and e-way bill integration, multi-branch, and support that answers. What you should never pay for is the ability to export your own records.
What "free" usually costs, where it costs something: a cap on volume, a watermark, a single login, your data held in a form you cannot get out, or a trial dressed up as a plan. The first three are honest limits. The fourth is not, and it is worth checking for specifically before you move a year of billing into anything.
Here the free plan is ₹0 with no card and no expiry, with limits on volume, one login and a watermark on the PDF — and full export on every plan, including that one.
Receivables: the report people buy billing software for
Ask a small business owner what they want from billing software and the answer is rarely about invoices. It is "I want to know who owes me money", and that is a report, not a document.
What produces it is every invoice with its payments applied, aged into buckets, grouped by customer. Then "what is overdue" is a screen rather than an afternoon, and a conversation with a customer has a number in it rather than an impression.
This is also the thing no file can do, however well built. A spreadsheet of invoices knows what you billed; the payments are in a bank statement somewhere else, and bringing the two together by hand is the work nobody does until it is urgent.
The report that matters most is not the total but the pattern. One customer who is always thirty days late is a terms problem rather than a chasing problem, and that is only visible when the history sits in one place.
What you get, free
- Complete GST tax invoices — every legally required field, tax split per line, not a template with a tax box.
- Customers stored once with GSTIN, address and state.
- Items stored once with HSN or SAC, rate and tax.
- Tax derived, not chosen — CGST and SGST or IGST, from the place of supply against your registration state.
- One numbering series, issued centrally, consecutive within the financial year.
- Stock that moves as you bill, so a closing figure means something.
- A receivables position — who owes what, aged, without adding anything up.
- PDF invoices to print, email or send on WhatsApp.
- Full export to CSV, Excel and JSON, on every plan including the free one.
- ₹0 — no card, no expiry, not a trial.
Moving off a spreadsheet without losing a month
- Pick a cut-off date. The start of a month or a quarter is easiest to reconcile against.
- Tidy the spreadsheet first: one row per invoice, no merged cells, GSTINs in their own column.
- Import customers, then items. Fix what the import reports rather than what you assume it got wrong.
- Enter only the unpaid invoices. Settled history can stay in the file — you need the balances, not the archive.
- Set the next invoice number to carry on from the last one you issued, so the series stays consecutive across the move.
- Bill everything from the cut-off date onwards in the new system and keep the old file read-only.
- Reconcile one month both ways before you stop maintaining the spreadsheet.
Questions worth asking any vendor, including this one
Six questions, in the order of how much they cost you if you do not ask.
Can I export everything, in full, whenever I want, on the plan I am on? If export is a paid feature, your records are leverage. What happens to my data if I stop paying? "Locked" and "deleted" should both end the conversation. Who can see my data, and where is it stored? Can two people bill at once on one numbering series, and what does the second login cost? What happens when the internet drops at my counter? And what does this cost next year, after whatever the first-year price is?
None of these appear on a comparison table, and all of them are the reasons people change billing software eighteen months after choosing it.
For the record, on this product: export is on every plan including the free one, the free plan does not expire so records never become unreachable, billing needs a connection, and the paid plans are bought for a fixed term with no auto-renewal and no card kept on file.
The numbering series, which is where file-based billing fails
The rule is short: a consecutive serial number, unique within the financial year, not more than sixteen characters, using only letters, numbers, hyphens and slashes. One series, or clearly separated series where you genuinely need more than one, each consecutive in itself.
A file cannot enforce any part of that. The number is typed, so it can be repeated, skipped, or quietly rolled back when yesterday's invoice is edited into today's. Nothing notices, and the duplicate is found at return time rather than at billing time — a month after it happened, when the customer already holds their copy.
The forgotten half is cancellation. A cancelled invoice keeps its number and stays in the series as cancelled. Deleting the row and reusing the number leaves a gap in your books and a figure in your customer's, and reconciling those two is a long afternoon with a bad ending.
This is the most practical argument for a system over a file and it has nothing to do with features. It is the one thing a file structurally cannot do.
Invoice numbering: one unbroken series per year
The invoice number has to be consecutive, unique within the financial year, and no more than sixteen characters of letters, numbers, slashes and hyphens. Gaps invite questions. Duplicates cause them.
This is the single most common reason a spreadsheet-based billing setup fails an audit: two people billing on two machines, both starting from the last number they remember. A system that issues the number centrally cannot make that mistake.
The series restarts on 1 April, and Billixo restarts it for you rather than waiting to be told.
Credit notes, debit notes, and fixing a wrong invoice
An issued tax invoice is not something to edit. If the value was too high, or goods came back, the correction is a credit note that references the original invoice. If it was too low, a debit note. Both carry their own numbers and both appear in your return.
There is a deadline on the credit note that matters: the adjustment has to be declared by the return for the relevant month of the following financial year, or by the annual return, whichever comes first. Past that, the note exists commercially but the tax cannot be adjusted.
Software that lets you quietly retype an invoice raised last month is not doing you a favour.
Bill scanning, in practice
The single largest time cost in most small businesses is not raising invoices — it is entering purchases. A photograph of a supplier bill goes in and a structured draft comes out: supplier, GSTIN, line items, rates, tax split and total.
You check it. That is the workflow, and it is deliberate: an extraction you did not read is a liability, not a saving. But checking a filled form takes fifteen seconds and typing one takes three minutes, and that difference compounds over a month of purchases.
Who it is built for
Small and mid-sized Indian businesses that are registered under GST and bill regularly. One person doing everything, or a counter with three people billing at once and an accountant who needs the month to close cleanly.
The design assumption throughout is that whoever raises the invoice is busy and is not a tax specialist. So the tax is computed rather than asked for, the compliance fields are populated rather than presented as questions, and the report the accountant wants is a download rather than a request.
Try it free — the free plan needs no card and does not expire.
What "free" means here, exactly
The Free plan costs nothing, needs no card, and has no expiry date. It is not a trial that turns into a bill; it is a plan you can run a small business on indefinitely.
What it gives you:
- Real GST invoices with the full Rule 46 field set
- Customers and products, with HSN/SAC held against each
- A daily and monthly invoice allowance, generous enough for a small operation
- One login
- Export of your own data, whenever you want it
What it does not give you:
- A watermark-free PDF
- GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B export
- The AI features — bill scanning, HSN lookup, the assistant
- Extra team logins, bulk import, recurring invoices and reminders
Every new account also gets the full paid feature set for its first 14 days, so you can see what the ceiling looks like before deciding whether you need it. When that ends nothing is charged and nothing is deleted — the account simply settles onto Free.
Start free now — it takes an email address and about a minute.
Reliability, backups and getting your data out
Cloud billing software is only as good as its worst day. Two things matter more than any feature list: that your data is backed up somewhere you can reach, and that you can export it in a format something else can read.
Exports here are CSV, Excel and JSON, on every plan including the free one, covering customers, products, invoices and payments. That is the honest test of whether software respects you — not what it promises, but what it lets you take when you leave.
Frequently asked questions
Can two people use it at the same time?
On the paid plans, yes — separate logins against one shared numbering series, so two people cannot issue the same invoice number. That one requirement is what rules out spreadsheets for a business with two billers.
Does it work offline?
No. It runs in a browser and needs a connection to issue a bill. If your counter loses internet for long stretches, installed software is the better engineering choice and it is better to know that now.
Will it handle my GST returns?
It prepares and exports GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B figures on the paid plans, and reconciles purchases against GSTR-2B. Filing happens on the government portal — nothing here submits a return on your behalf.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes. It is a browser application that adapts to the screen, so the same account works from a desktop at the counter and a phone in the market. There is no separate app to keep in step.
Can more than one person use it?
On the paid plans, yes — team logins with their own credentials. The Free plan is a single login, which suits a one-person operation and is usually the first limit a growing business hits.
Try it — the demo is the product
There is no sales call and no scheduled demo, because a recorded walkthrough of somebody else’s data tells you nothing about your own. Open an account instead and raise a real invoice for a real customer; it takes about a minute and costs nothing.
Open the software demo → — sign in, or create a free account from the same screen.
See full details on the home page → — features, the AI, pricing and the answers to the usual questions.
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