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Overall Satisfaction with FreshBooks
We use FreshBooks for all of our expense tracking, client invoicing, and project time tracking. I use it personally and each of my contractors/service providers have accounts as well. My contractors also invoice me directly through FreshBooks. We can also coordinate with our bookkeeper to export the information she needs.
Pros
- Invoices branded for my company are sent directly to my clients from within FreshBooks.
- FreshBooks will request reviews of my services from my clients when they make payments.
- Online payments can be made by my clients directly from the invoice.
Cons
- 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.
- Since implementing FreshBrooks, 80% of invoices created are paid in less than 30 days from the time the invoice is sent via email to the client. Prior to FreshBooks, we were mailing or hand-delivering our invoices and payment on those invoices was in the 45-90 day range.
- Time tracking is done directly in FreshBooks (or through a plugin that's connected directly to FreshBooks) and is very easy to use. With this feature we're much better able to track all business activities. This has helped us to quantify the time we're spending on non-billable business-related work in addition to our billable client hours. We've been able to adjust our pricing accordingly, as well as being more efficient with our non-billable activities.
- When FreshBooks online payments is set-up in your account, payments made with this method are automatically sent to your bank account. We choose between FreshBooks payments and PayPal payments in order to manage how much money stays in the PayPal account for online expenses vs. how much is transferred directly to the bank account.
QuickBooks felt very accounting centered. FreshBooks feels more like business software instead of accounting software. I don't know all of the accounting terms, and I don't have time to learn them all. So FreshBooks was just much easier to sit down and use right away. QuickBooks was obviously very robust, but I needed something a little more intuitive to jump in and run with as a new business owner.
FreshBooks Feature Ratings
Using FreshBooks
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Invoicing clients (creating invoice and emailing it to client)
- Time tracking
- Expense tracking
- Sharing client reviews - there is no single location where all client reviews can be shared for others to see.
- Credits in the system can sometimes be a bit finicky. When a client overpays on an invoice, a credit is created. When applying that credit to a future invoice, the 'credit' stays in the system, even though it was applied. I haven't had to use it much so it's not been a big issue though.
- I haven't tried to use recurring payments in FreshBooks in a while because my first experience with them a while ago was not positive. The recurring invoice was created but not automatically sent. I believe that the feature has been improved much since then, but I've not tried it again.
Yes - The Mobile FreshBooks app interface is very similar to the full online web interface. The app is particularly useful for capturing expense receipts for in-person purchases as you can take a picture of the receipt right from the app. All of the basic features I need on a regular basis are available in the mobile app.
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