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Sliced Invoices Review – A Powerful Free WordPress Invoice Plugin
Sliced Invoices is a WordPress invoice plugin that gives you full control over sending invoices and quotes to your clients.
Even better, everything is handled from within your WordPress dashboard. No need to use an external tool.
And best of all, Sliced Invoices is free to use (though it does have premium extensions).
In my Sliced Invoices review, I’ll first talk about why you might want to use Sliced Invoices over an external solution like Freshbooks or PayPal invoices. Then, I’ll get into the feature list and hands-on review.
Why Invoice With WordPress Over an External Invoicing Tool?
If you’ve ever researched invoicing solutions, you know that there are tons of tools out there that can help you invoice and collect payments. So why should you choose Sliced Invoices and WordPress over those tools?
First, most, though not all, invoicing tools charge a monthly fee for as long as you use the service. That means you’re paying out money every single month to handle your invoicing.
If you go with Sliced Invoices, it’s either:
- 100% free
- A one-time fee if you need some of the premium add-ons.
So once you get it installed with all of the features you need, there’s no monthly charge eating into your margins.
Second, when you use a third-party invoicing tool, you’re trusting them with all of your financial data. Personally, this doesn’t bother me that much as long as the company is trustworthy. But it’s absolutely a valid concern.
When you use Sliced Invoices, you’re fully in control of all of your data. Just make sure to follow WordPress security best practices.
Third, you also have full control over the line items on your invoice. If you invoice with something like PayPal, you’re locked into their basic set of line items and columns.
If that works for you, great! But as a freelance writer, I like to be able to have a specific column for “word count” and something like PayPal doesn’t give me the flexibility to do that.
Overview of Sliced Invoices Features
Sliced Invoices helps you send invoices and quotes in a variety of formats. You can customize your own line items, auto increment your invoice numbers, and choose from Sliced Invoices’ invoice designs or create your own.
When it comes time to accept payments, you can offer a number of payment gateways (some require premium add-ons, though). Your potential payment gateways are:
- PayPal Express
- Stripe
- Braintree
- 2Checkout
You can also choose offline payment methods like bank, check, money order, etc.
And if needed, you can invoice in any currency and export all of your invoices to CSV to keep an offline backup.
I’ve actually played around with Sliced Invoices before this review, and I can say that, at least for a freelancer like myself, it’s not missing any features.
Hands On With Sliced Invoices
Sliced Invoices set me up with a test site with all of the paid add-ons. I’ll go through the process of setting up basic invoices and quotes, first. Then, I’ll show you what some of those premium add-ons can do.
When you install the plugin, the first thing you’ll want to do is go through all of the configuration options. These options let you set up things like:
- Your business logo and contact information
- Pre-defined line items (makes creating invoices much quicker)
- Due dates/validity for invoices and quotes
- Payment gateways
- Other pertinent details.
Setting Up Pre-Defined Line Items
In the General tab, you can choose your fiscal year and set up pre-defined line items. These allow you to pre-fill your invoices to save time. You can always edit them later if needed. I’ll set them up as if I offer flat-rate services:
Later on, I’ll show you how these pre-defined line items work when it comes time to invoice.
Adding Your Business Details
In the Business tab, you set up your business details to customize the information on your invoice. Basically, you’ll add contact details as well as your logo:
Other Settings Tabs
Ok, I don’t want to bore you to death showing you every single tiny setting in the remaining tabs. But across the rest of them, you’ll configure things like:
- How long quotes are valid for.
- When invoices are due.
- Terms and conditions that appear on your invoices and quotes.
- Which template to use for invoices.
- Your currency and payment gateways.
- Text for your invoice emails.
Most of these include default settings, so you only need to configure them if you want to personalize things.
How to Send an Invoice With Sliced Invoices
Now that everything is configured, let’s send our first invoice!
To send an invoice, you’ll use a new custom post type named Invoices:
When you click Add New Invoice, you’ll see what is basically the normal WordPress Editor with heaps of new meta boxes.
At the top, you enter a title and description:
Below that, you add your line items. This is where those pre-defined line items from earlier come into play. You can either add completely new line items, you can quickly add one of your pre-defined items:
And once you’ve got the invoice details squared away, you need to hook up the invoice with a client and add some other details.
You can either choose an existing client for repeat business or create a new client:
One awesome feature is that you can also customize payment methods, currency, and tax rate on a per-invoice basis:
Once you fill everything out, you’re ready to Publish the invoice. Publishing doesn’t send your invoice quite yet, though. To send it, you need to go back to the Invoices page and actually click a button to send out the email. This is nice because it gives you a chance to double check for any potential errors before you send:
And here’s what that invoice looks like in real life using the pre-made template that I chose:
When you send the invoice, its status will change to Unpaid. You can always view your invoices by their status on this page:
And another nice thing is that you can quickly clone an invoice. Because you’ll probably work with the same clients over and over, this can potentially save you a ton of time:
The process for sending Quotes is pretty much identical, just with a few changes in terminology (e.g. “accepted” instead of “paid”).
Viewing Reports About Your Invoices
Ok, this is the last thing that I’ll show you. If you ever want to see how your business is doing, Sliced Invoices gives you reports to quickly view the status and monetary value of your invoices:
It’s nice for getting a quick overview of where you stand with all of your invoices.
Sliced Invoices Pricing and Premium Add-Ons
Ok, so everything I showed you above…you get all of that for free. Yup – you can do everything I did without spending a single penny.
But Sliced Invoices also includes some paid extensions that offer helpful functionality. Here’s everything you can add to the features I showed above:
- More payment gateways – Stripe, Braintree, 2Checkout
- Better URLs – customize your URLs for better branding.
- Client area – give clients their own area at your site to manage their invoices.
- Deposit invoices – quickly collect separate deposit payments.
- Discounts and partial payments – self-explanatory!
- Recurring and Subscription invoices – create recurring invoices or subscription payments.
- WooCommerce – integrate with WooCommerce.
Plus a few others that help with form integrations and translations.
To purchase the premium extensions, you’re looking at ~$15-30 each, depending on the specific extension.
Sliced Invoices also offers extension bundles, which get you a much cheaper deal.
Wrapping Things Up
This is the second time I’ve played around with Sliced Invoices. Both times, I’ve come away thinking it’s a great solution for invoicing.
The only thing that’s stopped me from personally using it is that Freshbooks/Harvest have access to PayPal $.50 flat-rate business payments, which lets me save money invoicing my US-based clients. But those cheap payments only work for bank payments within the USA.
So if you accept credit cards or have international clients, you wouldn’t have access to those low-fee payments anyway. In which case, I think Sliced Invoices is definitely worth checking out.
Plus, because the free version is so feature-rich, you’re not risking anything.
Install the free version and play around with it. Then, if you like it, considering adding some of the premium extensions for even more functionality.