Sage US is retiring Billing Boss in favour of promoting SageOne. The announcement, made by email today says:
We would like to thank you for your support of Sage Billing Boss, our free online invoicing solution. Due to the need to focus on newer online technologies, Sage has decided to retire Sage Billing Boss effective December 14, 2012.
Although we will be retiring Sage Billing Boss, Sage has introduced an exciting new online business management solution, Sage One, which includes online invoicing capabilities and much more. With Sage One, businesses can manage their money and invoices, track projects and tasks, send and receive messages and create reports in one central web-based application.
While Sage Billing Boss was a North American initiative, Sage One is a global initiative. Sage One is built with the latest technology and has been adopted, developed, and shared among a number of Sage offices around the world. You can try Sage One for FREE for 30 days.
It’s always sad to see a solution get chopped and was to be expected given Sage’s recent announcements. The problem is that Sage is not offering customers a way to get hold of their data other than getting some of it into SageOne. Per the FAQ (PDF):
Q: Will Sage help me switch customer data to Sage One?
A: Yes, the Sage One Customer Support team (1-866-835-9301) will assist you with exporting contacts from Sage Billing Boss and importing them into Sage One.
That is shockingly bad practice. What about all those Billing Boss users that might only need a Freshbooks or Blinksale? What about the data that Billing Boss created?
Yet another example of how Sage doesn’t ‘get it’ when it comes to cloud solutions.
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Fresh content: Sage retires Billing Boss but no get of jail free card http://t.co/4bv0U5xz #cloudcomputingsaas
Sage retires Billing Boss but no get of jail free card: Sage US is retiring Billing Boss in favour of promoting … http://t.co/xG7HMGvm
RT @dahowlett: Fresh content: Sage retires Billing Boss but no get of jail free card http://t.co/4bv0U5xz #cloudcomputingsaas
If they are holding our data, that’s truly absurd. I’ve been with them for the last couple of years and since they are shutting down I’ve been looking for alternatives. So far I am very pleased with Curdbee compared to Freshbooks, Blinksale and Invoice machine. They said they can import the data to their platform provided I get all my data in .csv format. Thus I am not sure how to get the data transferred in to a .csv from my Billing Boss account. I wrote to BB’s support and awaiting for their reply still. If you have any tips, appreciate them.
The price is very good up to the $20/month level where it is way out of whack with others.
Sage retires Billing Boss but no get of jail free card AccMan http://t.co/NulliyeR
So what options do we have for a similar online service?
Curdbee looks good but no free recurring invoices or generation of PDF files
When they say they are stopping supporting it, does that mean they are stopping development, i.e. will the site remain open for us to use?
You know what I know. They’re saying retired, i.e. gone. As I said earlier, Curdbee is OK but there are other options.
RT @DoMyBooks: Sage retires Billing Boss but no get of jail free card AccMan http://t.co/NulliyeR
I am in the same situation. I’ve been using Billing Boss for my business since December 2010. Even if I did want to take their paid offering, I still can’t extract my data. I am now wondering whether I will have to write a screen scraper to try to get my information back. This is data I am legally obliged to retain! I am not happy!
This is a shame, do you know of any other free invoicing solutions. Correct me if I’m wrong but was freshbooks a free solution at one point in time? I checked their website and it appears to be a paid solution only?
you get what you pay for…free doesn’t often give you much value in my experience