FreshBooks vs. Power BI For Office 365 (discontinued)

I recommend FreshBooks to anyone running a service-based business that needs invoicing, time reporting, and accounting tools. FB is adept in all three of these scenarios and isn't overly complicated like similar accounting packages I have used. I love how I can write estimates and proposals, manage the business development process from the software, and quickly convert prospects to invoiced clients.

Incentivized

If you're already using Office 365, Power BI for O365 is an easy choice. Start playing around with the free version and then easily add individual Pro licenses with little risk. However, if you anticipate using this with many users, it can get expensive quickly.

Incentivized

• Invoicing - FreshBooks basically ensures our accountants spend less time on invoices via its automated invoicing system, which sends invoices to our customers and clients alike and also send them regular reminders for them to pay up their bills.
• Collecting business insights - FreshBooks enable our company analysts measure our business performances via data reports provided by FreshBooks' intuitive dashboard. Allowing us do a comparative analysis of key business metrics of a current month against past months and determine if the business is growing.
• Expense tracker - We have recently embraced FreshBooks as an expense tracker for teams at our company branch. Thusfar, FreshBooks has performed very well, making our expense management a perfect operation; ensuring teams do not exceed their planned budget and also eliminating the need for tracking expenses on excel spreadsheets.

Incentivized

• Easy to make visual dashboards from SQL queries. Previously we had to use a third party application that had to run on a web server that was so complex to setup and run. PowerBI removes all that.
• Ability to control who/which group has access to each dashboard or report. Ties in well with the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem.
• Has many connectors to allow pulling data from various systems, both onsite (via gateway) or external (via APIs), and join the data to create a report/dashboard.
• Ability to show data but also export the data, if permitted.
• Easy to show PowerBI dashboards on SharePoint or on other websites via embedded code.

Incentivized

• I can brand invoices with my business logo, but I might like to change colours of the invoices themselves to match the rest of my business documents. That isn't a major point at all, but it's something that I'd like to see.
• Freshbooks doesn't remember the categories that similar expenses were previously assigned to. It would be nice if Freshbooks would suggest a category for an already saved vendor, to ensure the consistency of expense reporting.
• The home page of a Freshbooks account has a great graph display of expenses and income, but it only shows the last 6 months. This is still very useful, but I'd like to be able to see this kind of graph for different periods of time.

• Licensing: Currently, Microsoft has a fixed pricing model for Office 365 users, regardless of role/function of the user. Most organizations have a small number of "power users" that create usable content and many more "consumers" that simply view/run reports created by power users. Microsoft does not differentiate between these users, and thus the pricing limits organizations from large deployments of the software.
• Version incompatibility: Excel 2010 and 2013 workbooks are compatible with each other. However, workbooks created in 2010 that include PowerPivot databases must be upgraded to 2013 format to run in 2013. Subsequently, you cannot open these upgraded PowerPivot workbooks in 2010. This requires ALL users to be on the same version.
• Visualization: Excel charting with PowerPivot workbooks is adequate for many users. Power View also contains a number of GREAT visualizations, including animated bubble charts and a very flexible dashboard/report design canvas. However, compared to some of the other self-service BI solutions, it is still limited in its visualization capabilities.

At the current needs of our business, FreshBooks suits us perfectly - it allows online access by our accountant to the system for GST purposes, easy input of expenses and tracking of Profit and Loss statements. FreshBooks customer service is great as well - very understanding and accommodating.

I will continue to recommend this suite to folks looking for a reporting and analytics solution, as I find in MOST cases, it's great at meeting almost every requirement I've been given by a multitude of clients across a range of industries. I've built Capacity Planning solutions that allowed end user input which was then submitted to SharePoint, Executive Dashboards, custom applications, simple analytical tools for teams to easily slice and dice data, and super simple reports as well as some very complicated ones. If you haven't seen the demos online, do a search, and see for yourself - this is a great BI suite! (I do not work for Microsoft, although I do consult out there from time to time. I do occasionally make a recommendation for a different BI reporting tool, but in general, find Excel can accomplish quite a bit for less money and in less time.)

FreshBooks is very easy to use even for novices. If you're looking for an online accounting software that is full of features, has great aesthetics and is user-friendly, then this is definitely the software for you. I've been using it for several years now and despite being tempted to switch by other vendors, I like the feel of FreshBooks and it's mobile features.

Incentivized

We are satisfied with the functionality and capabilities of Power BI. Product is cost effective and full-fill the reporting requirements of the organization. You can perform most of the report level complex analysis with the help of DAX which makes Power BI very powerful analytic tool. Power BI for Office 365 has gone away and Power BI is the next evolution of it. Power BI comes with your Office 365 E5 subscription or you can purchase licensing for it separately.

Incentivized

FreshBooks is easy to use and always works!

Incentivized

I think the support level for FreshBooks is on par with a 6 because the folks behind this application do a fairly good job at providing support for their customer base. I still don't think they are at an elite level when it comes to supporting but are getting there although too slow in my opinion.

Incentivized

as of now there is strong community for Power BI, you can get solution for most of your problems from there. Also you can send your error to Microsoft as well. After every 15 days they release updates to overcome all the issues of defects.

Incentivized

I haven't changed my mind since my first evaluation. Freshbooks is still meeting my needs, easy to use, etc.

FreshBooks does very well in comparison, especially since it is free software for Barclays bank users. Sage software is much worse than FreshBooks. However, Xero and QuickBooks, the market leaders, are still ahead with usability, additional features, reporting, and connection with third-party software providers. We chose FreshBooks as it does everything we require from this type of software.

Incentivized

Oracle was nice, super expensive to implement if it's not in use already. JobDiva is choppy and heavy on the system while does not give great reports. Salesforce is good; remote access is good however their support is terrible

Incentivized

• In reality, we do not implement all of its use at the moment in order to determine an adequate ROI.
• In our approach to the use of the system, it seems to us a considerable time saving by achieving the integration of the Mexican subsidiary with its parent located in the US.
• Financial reports meet the necessary USGAAP requirements.

Incentivized

• As a Microsoft Partner implementing Business Intelligence solutions, Power BI has removed the barrier for our clients to begin the "BI journey". So often, projects get hung up in that early phase of procuring and installing/configuring expensive hardware and software. Just simply getting started and designing a beginning solution has allowed our clients to see results in 1-2 weeks using their data that might have taken months to achieve otherwise.
• One significant ROI example is process improvement. In many cases, individuals or teams are spending days each month gathering data from multiple sources for reporting to their constituents. We are reducing these times to minutes by automating many of the data collection and integration processes that were previously manual.