FreshBooks - Cloud Time Tracking, Ethereal Accounting
Overall Satisfaction with FreshBooks
FreshBooks was used for time tracking and invoicing purposes across a team of consultants. These consultants principally worked on-site with clients in a variety of environments, from offices to oil fields. We tracked the time that consultants were engaged on projects in different capacities and invoiced clients directly through the FreshBooks interface. We also used data from FreshBooks for bookkeeping, but principally relied on a separate product for the majority of accounting functions.
Pros
- Ease of use in adding new users to the system and onboarding their use of the FreshBooks interface
- The ability to create new projects and work types within those projects and assign individual contributors to each was well-developed
- Time tracking through the FreshBooks mobile app was easy to do and synced without difficulty
Cons
- The reporting functionality was somewhat limited, and the ability to export data had significant room for improvement
- Creating custom invoices and rules around when to issue invoices could have been made easier
- The expense logging was sometimes confusing was executed across multiple clients/projects
- Employee efficiency initially decreased as time was spent adjusting to the system, but ultimately time was saved as managers did not need to track down consultants whose time was not being tracked daily.
- Customers with unique invoicing requirements were unable to interface with FreshBooks efficiently, and for many of our larger clients, we were unable to submit invoices directly and instead had to manually export the data to a separate tool.
- FreshBooks provided timely customer service and seemed to understand their own limitations, but were not always helpful in providing workarounds to some common problems.
FreshBooks is a barebones solution for companies looking for better time tracking and time management software deployed in the Cloud. Its invoicing and expense tracking tools are useful up to a point, but supplementing with additional tools is likely necessary beyond a narrow use case. Long term, FreshBooks would benefit from an expanded featureset and the ability to integrate with a broader range of systems.
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