What you need from legal invoice depends almost entirely on how your bills get raised — at a counter, on a site, after an event, or monthly against a connection. This page takes those seriously before it mentions anything we sell.
The question to ask before any feature list
There is one question that predicts whether a billing system will suit a business, and it is not about features. It is: how does a bill get raised here?
At a counter with a queue, the only thing that matters is seconds per bill — scanning, a saved customer, a printer that works. On a site or after an event, nothing is urgent but the detail is complicated, and what matters is that the bill can be checked against what was agreed. Billed monthly against a connection or a tenancy, it is a schedule, and what matters is that last month is remembered.
Those three shapes want different things, and a system built for one is uncomfortable in another. Work out which one you are before reading anyone's feature list, including ours.
Law firm billing
Legal billing is mostly a records problem wearing an invoice. The fee is the easy part; what takes the work is attributing time and disbursements to the right matter and the right client, and being able to show it.
The structures in use are all different documents in practice: time billed at an hourly rate, a fixed fee for a defined piece of work, a monthly retainer, and a bill rendered at the conclusion of a matter. Disbursements sit alongside all of them and need care — court fees and similar amounts paid on the client's behalf as a pure agent, with the receipts in the client's name, sit outside your taxable value; recovered as part of your charge, they are inside it.
Advocates' own services have a particular GST position, including where reverse charge applies and who is liable to pay, and it depends on who the client is. That is genuinely worth confirming for your own practice rather than assuming — it is not the ordinary service default.
What this does: invoices, retainers, recurring bills, per-client balances and the GST treatment. What it does not: it is not practice management. No matter management, no time capture against a running timer, no conflict checks. If the time recording is the problem you are solving, this is not the product for that half of it.
What you get on the free plan
- Complete GST tax invoices with every legally required field, not a template with a tax box.
- Customers and items stored once, with GSTIN, state, HSN or SAC and rate held against them.
- Tax derived rather than typed — per line, from the item rate and the place of supply.
- One numbering series, issued centrally and consecutive within the financial year.
- Stock that moves as you bill, so a closing figure means something.
- An answer to "who owes me what", aged, without adding anything up.
- PDF invoices to print, email or send on WhatsApp.
- Full export — CSV, Excel and JSON, on every plan including the free one.
- ₹0, no card, no expiry.
Setting it up for your trade
- Start free now — email and password, no card.
- Enter your business name, address and GSTIN once.
- Add your items with their HSN or SAC codes and their own rates, or import the list from a spreadsheet.
- Add the customers you bill regularly, with GSTIN and state where they are registered.
- Set the number your invoice series should carry on from, so nothing restarts mid-year.
- Raise one real bill and print it on the printer you actually use. This is the test that matters.
- Time yourself on five bills at your own counter before you decide anything.
The second person, and what changes
Almost every billing system that fails does so at the point a second person starts billing, and the failure is always the same shape. Two people, two copies, two numbering series, and a month that cannot be reconciled.
What a shared system changes is not convenience but authority. There is one record, one series of numbers issued centrally, and an audit of who raised what. None of that is possible when the record is a file that can be copied.
It changes what you can delegate, too. Billing can be handed to staff while the reports stay yours, because seeing a day's total and editing a day's invoices are different permissions. With a shared file they are the same permission.
If you are a single operator today, this is the thing to plan for rather than the thing to buy for. Moving a year of history is the expensive part, and it gets more expensive each month.
What a billing system cannot do for a trade
Worth saying plainly, because a page like this is usually written the other way round. Billing software issues documents, keeps records and reports. It does not run the trade-specific machinery around them.
It will not integrate with your weighing scale, your fuel dispensers, your kitchen display or your network provisioning. It does not hold clinical records or manage appointments. It does not do production planning, project costing or time capture. Where any of those is the actual problem, a billing system is not the answer to it and will not become one.
What it does do is the part every trade shares: a correct document, a numbering series that holds, tax computed rather than typed, a record of who owes what, and figures that a return can be built from. That is a narrow job done properly.
The sensible way to choose is to write down the three things that would make the software useless to you, then test those three first. Features are easy to compare and mostly not the deciding factor.
HSN and SAC codes, and how many digits you need
Every line on a tax invoice needs an HSN code for goods or a SAC for services. How many digits depends on your aggregate turnover in the preceding financial year — smaller businesses report fewer digits than larger ones, and B2B and B2C invoices are treated differently.
Because the requirement is tied to turnover and has been tightened in stages, the practical answer is to store the fullest code you can against each product once, and let the software report at the level required. A six-digit code can always be truncated; a two-digit one cannot be expanded.
Billixo keeps the code on the product record and carries it onto every line automatically, and its AI HSN lookup will suggest one from a plain description when you genuinely do not know.
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.
The AI, and what it is actually for
The useful application of AI to billing is not a chatbot. It is the twenty minutes a day spent retyping things that already exist on paper.
- Scan a supplier bill. Photograph it; the lines, the GSTIN, the tax and the totals come back as a draft you check rather than a form you fill.
- Find the HSN code. Describe the product in plain words and get a code to confirm, instead of scrolling a list of eleven thousand.
- Ask about your own numbers. "What is outstanding over sixty days?" answered from your data, not a manual.
- Write the reminder. A polite, specific chase for an overdue invoice, ready to send on WhatsApp.
Nothing is sent anywhere until you ask for it, and the platform runs on whichever model it has been configured with — including one hosted on your own server.
Who this actually suits
It fits a business that raises between a handful and a few hundred invoices a month and would rather not think about GST between the 10th and the 20th: traders, distributors, retail counters, workshops, agencies, consultants, contractors and manufacturers who sell on invoice.
It fits less well if you need deep manufacturing costing, multi-currency consolidation, or payroll — those are different products, and pretending otherwise wastes your evaluation time.
If you are not sure which side of that line you fall on, the free plan answers it in an afternoon at no cost. Start free now.
Free, and what it costs you instead
Free software usually costs you something that is not money: your data held hostage, an export that does not work, ads inside your invoice, or a "free" tier so narrow it is a demo with a login screen.
The line here is drawn differently. Export works on the free plan — CSV, Excel and JSON — because data you cannot get out is not data you own. The invoice is a real compliant invoice, not a sample. The limits are on volume and on the conveniences, not on whether the thing works.
Start free now. If it does not suit you, take your data with you.
Where your data lives
On the server this platform is installed on. Every record carries a company identifier and every query is scoped to the signed-in account at the framework level, so one business cannot read another’s data by any route, including a crafted one.
Sign-in is rate limited, sessions can be restricted to one device per user, and passwords are stored hashed. Exports are available on every plan, free included: if you ever want to leave, your data leaves with you.
Frequently asked questions
Will it file my GST returns?
It prepares the figures and exports GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B data on the paid plans. Filing happens on the government portal, and nothing here submits a return on your behalf or claims to.
Is there a free plan?
Yes. The Free plan is ₹0, needs no card and has no expiry date. It carries volume limits, a single login and a small watermark on the PDF, and the invoice it issues is a complete GST tax invoice. Every new account also gets the full paid feature set for its first fortnight so you can see the ceiling before deciding.
Will it work for my trade specifically?
Test it rather than take anyone's word. Load ten of your own items including two at different tax rates, raise a real bill, print it on your own printer and time yourself. Half an hour on the free plan tells you more than any feature list, including this one.
Is my data shared with anyone?
No. It sits in this installation, scoped to your company. AI requests only happen when you explicitly ask for one, and nothing is sent anywhere otherwise.
Is it really free?
Yes. The Free plan is ₹0, needs no card and has no expiry. It has volume limits and leaves out the paid conveniences — watermark-free PDFs, GST return exports, the AI features, extra logins — but the invoices it produces are real GST invoices, and you can export your data from it whenever you like.
Start free, decide later
You do not have to choose a plan to begin. Start on Free, use it for as long as it suits you, and upgrade only when a limit actually gets in your way — never automatically, and never because a countdown ran out.
Open the software demo → — or create the free account from the same page.
Read the full details → on the home page, including pricing and the AI features.
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