What you are actually being asked to adopt
Open most invoicing products and the invoice is three screens in. Before you get there you are asked to set a financial year, pick a chart of accounts, decide whether you report on cash or accrual basis, connect a bank account, and categorise some transactions.
None of that is a criticism of those products. Every one of those steps exists because somebody genuinely needs it. The problem is that they are presented as the price of entry for sending a bill, which for a lot of people they simply are not.
Which side of the line are you on?
A useful test, rather than a slogan. Read both columns honestly — the left one is not the wrong answer.
| You probably want accounting software | You probably just want to invoice |
|---|---|
| You have employees and run payroll | It is you, or you and one other person |
| You hold stock, or track cost of goods sold | You sell your time and skill |
| You need profit-and-loss and balance-sheet reporting during the year | You need to know what came in, and you look at your bank app for that |
| Your accountant has asked you to reconcile a bank feed | Your accountant asks for totals and receipts once a year |
| You are VAT/GST registered with complex supplies | Your tax situation is one rate, or none, and you know which |
| You are chasing dozens of unpaid invoices at once | You can name everyone who currently owes you money |
If you were nodding along the left, stop reading and go get proper accounting software. It will do things this cannot, and doing them badly by hand is a false economy.
What you take on by skipping it
The honest version, because the pages that argue this position usually skip it.
- Your records are your responsibility. There is no system quietly filing everything. You keep the documents you issue and the receipts you collect, and you keep them somewhere you can find them — the IRS generally expects records behind a US return to be kept until the period of limitations runs out, usually three years and sometimes much longer.
- Nothing adds up your year for you. At tax time, somebody has to total what came in. If that somebody is your accountant, they will want your invoices and your bank statements, and they are perfectly used to receiving exactly that.
- Nothing tells you who has not paid. You watch your bank account, the way you probably already do.
- Backups are on you. Records that live on one device need exporting somewhere occasionally. This is the real cost of not having a server, and it is worth taking seriously.
What Invoice Tiger deliberately leaves out
This is not a roadmap. These are decisions, and they are what keep the app small enough to open, use and close between two jobs.
- No bookkeeping, no general ledger, no bank feeds, no reconciliation.
- No payroll, no expenses, no mileage, no tax filing.
- No inventory, no cost tracking, no reporting dashboards.
- No payment processing — a separate decision, explained separately.
- No paid/unpaid status, no overdue lists, no automatic reminders. A document is a draft or it has been sent, and that is all the app claims to know.
What it does instead
Invoices and estimates, saved customers, saved services, line items with quantities and rates, one discount, one tax rate, a deposit, payment instructions, notes, and a PDF that carries your logo and nothing of ours. Search across everything you have ever issued, by customer or by number. And a complete export of every record to a single file you keep.
There is no account, no password and no server, which means there is nothing to set up before the first invoice. You open it and make one. The whole workflow is on the iPhone page.
What to tell your accountant
That you issue invoices from a phone app, that you can export every document as a PDF, and that you can export the complete set of records as a file. In practice most small-business accountants want the invoices, the bank statements and the receipts, and that is exactly what you will have.
Worth being clear about one thing: the export is a backup of the app’s own records, not an accounting interchange format. It is how you keep your data and move it, not how you feed a ledger.
If what you actually need next is the mechanics of the document itself, what to include on an invoice and how to invoice for services cover it without mentioning the app much at all.
Sources
Record-keeping obligations differ by country and by circumstance. Nothing here is tax advice.
- Internal Revenue Service — How long should I keep records?The general three-year US retention period for records supporting a return, and the circumstances that extend it.