First Look: Blinksale 2.0

I had some advance warning that a new version of Blinksale, the Web 2.0 invoicing app, was in the works (see here). Today, I took a look. Basically, the team has added the complement of invoicing, which is receiving invoices from others, which they refer to as “Purchasing”:

The caption in the screenshot tells the story. You might receive an invoice from another Blinksale user. Then you could choose to pay it via… yes, you bet, I can imagine a time in the near future where Blinksale might step in and be the bank intermediary for transfer of the funds. And in the near future, they certainly could inform me that my invoice had been clicked “paid” at a client’s account, so long as the client had determined to let me see that action took place. A whole new sort of social interaction, through shared business processes.

Note also that Blinksale seems to be making the right steps to avoid the lack of federation that has started to bother me in Basecamp (see here), where I now have six or seven Basecamp identities, and no central dashboard. Blinksale could have gone down the wrong fork in the road, but they have avoided it.

Also note that this model — with both invoices and purchases — leads to a greater degree of virality. Someone receiving an invoice from Blinksale will probably have some option in the emailed invoice, asking “Would you like to manage all your invoices and purchases in Blinksale?” or the like.

Blinksale also supports the use of tags as an organization approach. Invoices (and purchases, too, although I don’t have any of those yet) can be tagged, and then filtered. Very cool.

They mentioned a few weeks ago that an integration with Basecamp was in the works, and thet it would likely be coming a few weeks after this new version rolled. Stay tuned. I bet it will support direct creation of invoices from Basecamp project timesheets.