Highlights of Contents
Overview
Welcome everyone. Here I am back with the review of a new accounting and invoicing software-Hiviage. What began in a single room in Colorado, with one computer, a dial-up connection and a group of web designers, has evolved and reshaped itself in a big way. Hiveage is a cloud based invoicing platform designed by Vesses. The company has officially launched this product as an up gradation of its predecessor Curdbee. It automatically inherits approximately 35,000 customers that have been using Curdbee to create invoices and initiate billing processes online.
Features
Dashboard: It showcases a graphical representation of monthly invoicing related summaries. It does not however indicate what’s past due, making the feature less useful.
Estimates: A very user friendly module which lets you easily send estimates to your clients with the click of a button. Clients can review and approve the quotes on the web. Once an estimate is approved, you can convert it to an invoice. An e-mail can also be created to accompany the estimates.
Contacts: It enables you to maintain a basic contact list of clients and contractors. You can also view your history of transactions with each business. It even allows multiple contacts per company; however, sending email invoice is restricted to primary contact only.
Areas of Improvement
The usage of Hiveage was quite a task. What frustrates me the most is that a product such as this which has huge business potential doesn’t seem to work as smooth as expected.
Navigation Insufficiencies: The screens are not planned and navigation adds unnecessary additional steps to reach to the desired result which otherwise is 1 to 2 clicks away while using other similar software.
Help Corner: It was surprising to find that even the most prominent words could not produce search results. Think of a help bar which generates no results for “invoice,” “contacts,” “bill, and even “tax”.
Bugs and Missing Features: I figured few minor bugs while using the software application. Also, the FAQ section lists a few features which are non-existent in the current software.
I see the product as a highly potential invoicing application which is thrown into the public arena without much testing. It advertises some features which don’t really appear in the program and some features which do but do not work properly. The overall concept of Hiveage is good but it will take some effort to keep pace with the other near free invoicing apps.
Pricing
Hiveage offers a free 30 days trial pack for a month which can be later upgraded to any of the 4 pricing plans. After a month the basic plan is for absolutely free with the fully loaded package going as high as $49.85/month.
Alternatives of Hiveage
Invoicera
