An interview with Marco Hererra

Marco runs "Quality Landscape", a landscape design and maintenance company. His company provides a variety of landscaping services for both residential and commercial clients in the greater Seattle area. Because he bills many of his customers the same amount every month, he was drawn to the automatic billing features in SimplifyThis.com.
Let's get started. How did you first hear about SimplifyThis?
Sanjay approached me through a friend and asked me if I would be interested in streamlining my invoicing system. I used to write paper invoices and hang them on my customers' doorknobs. This was quite inefficient for me. After hearing from Sanjay what SimplifyThis had to offer, I thought I should try it out.
What is your first impression of this invoicing application?
First of all, I am not very computer savvy, and I used to write my invoices by hand. When I heard about SimplifyThis.com, I was initially hesitant, but after seeing the screens and how simple it looked, I thought I could do it. One thing that I love is that there aren’t too many confusing features and functions. Everything is on one screen and it’s well organized.
How were you managing your invoices and payments before? What problems were you facing?
As I said, I typically wrote my invoices on paper by hand, so this was completely different for me. For me, I felt like I was writing the same thing over and over, because every single month I might have 30 or 40 invoices that were exactly the same as last month, and a handful of customers that I needed to bill for extra services that we performed, like spring-time tree pruning. Once I had the invoices written, I used to hang them to my customers' doorknobs or slip them under the doormats. Although most of my customers paid their bills on time, I always have to remind some of them to remember to pay their bills. Since many of my customers have been with me for years, I trust that they will eventually pay. One other reason I like Simplifythis.com is that before I was writing and placing invoices, waiting for a check to arrive in the mail, and then waiting another few days for the check to clear. It could easily be 3 weeks before I had my money in my account. With this application, my customers can click on a link in an email and can pay by credit card and I have my money in a couple of days. Since cash is always tight, having my money even 1-2 weeks earlier is critical for me.
What features of SimplifyThis do you use most? How does it help you?
Well, in addition to the customers, invoices and payments features, I make heavy use of the auto-bill feature. This feature is critical to making my business pretty much run on its own. Here’s what I do: I setup most of my regular customers with auto-bills. Generally, these go out at the end of the month with lines for regularly scheduled services. As I said, I occasionally do extra work for some of my customers, when requested. When I do this work, I note these items in SimplifyThis.com at the end of the work day as “Unbilled Charges? This is another critical feature for me because it lets me quickly add things I need to charge my customers for. Then at month end, the items are automatically added to the invoice. Even with the invoices go out automatically with auto-bill. This is great! I know that SimplifyThis.com has a reminders feature. I am not using this feature today, but as I add new customers, I can see this being a useful feature for me.
What are some of the features that SimplifyThis is missing? Any suggestions?
For me, SimplifyThis.com works great. If I had to suggest a few things, they would be: first, The ability to charge my customer’s credit card automatically instead of sending an invoice every month. Many of my clients do not want to be bothered with another small invoice to worry about each month. Plus, I would get paid even faster! The second thing I would like to see would be a few overview reports to help me quickly look through my customer list.
Thank you for your time and for using SimplifyThis.
Thank you.