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There will come a time in your business when you’ll need to invest in business accounting software. As your business grows, it's imperative to keep good financial records, without becoming overwhelmed.
As soon as you start researching, you’ll see there are lots of possible solutions. Erm, hello overwhelm! Don't worry we've got you.
Today, we’re going to talk about one of the market leaders, Freshbooks. We'll share the features, pros, cons and the main competitors. By the end of this Freshbooks review you’ll know if it’s the right solution for you. Pinky promise!
Free for 30 days
Review of: Freshbooks
Purpose: Business Accounting Software
Prices start at $15 (for 5 billable clients) up to $50 (for 500 billable clients). If you have more clients than this, they offer bespoke packages. As you increase your number of clients the costs shoot up rapidly.
They offer great customer support. Numerous customer service awards.
Thorough help centre, plus an information packed blog.
Incredibly easy to set up and use even if you don’t have much previous bookkeeping experience. Occasional navigational difficulty, but strong customer support & plenty of tools to help.
Protects your personal information with industry standard SSL and encryption, so your business is always safe & secure. Offers great features, but with some limitations – e.g. no Payroll.
FreshBooks is an accountancy software tool, founded in 2004 by 2ndsite, Inc. It's core market is small businesses, freelancers and individual retailers. They offer cloud-based accounting tools, which let you manage invoices, expenses and your time.
Optimize expense tracking
It’s easy with Freshbooks to track your business expenses. You can add and organize receipts in the software, and you’ll get an easy-to-read report. You can also track client expenses and add them directly to their invoice. Link the Expense Tool up with your bank or credit card account to import expenses directly from your bank.
Time tracking
Easily track your time against specific clients or projects in Freshbooks. There's a Chrome extension to allow time tracking in apps such as Asana and Trello. This helps you bill with accuracy and means you can add the hours you’ve tracked to your client’s invoice. You can manually log time in FreshBooks or use the built-in timer. Easily review the logged time of your employees and contractors. Then the time logged can be added to projects and invoices. You can choose to record un billable time as well.
Flexible Billing
FreshBooks offers flexible billing features. You can charge per hour or a flat rate according to your agreement with the client.
Thorough reporting
FreshBooks enables you to produce financial reports by processing data you’ve already entered. Easily generate an expense report or profit and loss report in just a few clicks. Filter your accounts records and generate accurate tax reports. Then export these reports and share them with your accountant with zero hassle.
Project Management
Set a time budget and due date for client projects and discuss the project with your team using the communication tool ‘discuss’.
Client Portal
They offer a well designed client portal. Your customers can accept, save, print, or comment on estimates. Pay, print, save and write messages on invoices and view, comment on, or accept proposals. This makes all the back and forth confined to one centralised place.
Contact Management
You can add basic client information as well as internal notes. Set a default language and currency, as well as creating default invoice reminders and late fees for each specific customer.
If you’re a service-based businesses, solopreneur or a freelancer, Freshbooks maybe be the solution for you. If you’re looking for an easy way to track expenses and invoice clients. Then, Freshbooks could take a weight off your shoulders.
QuickBooks works best for companies that sell products and require a scalable, fully-fledged accounting software. FreshBooks works best for service-based businesses, for freelancers and solopreneurs who need a way to track expenses and revenue for simple reports.
Both focus on small to mid sized business and freelancers. Freshbooks is more expensive ($15) compared to Zoho Books $9 (for their lowest priced plan). Freshbooks is a little easier to use and has better customer support.
Freshbooks is award-winning accounting software. It has a greater customer satisfaction levels, more features and it's just under half the price of Sage50. However, Freshbooks isn’t recommended for large organisations, where Sage50 is.
You can take advantage of their 30-day free trial.
Then you can pay yearly or monthly for all plans. Each plan has three tiers.
The ‘Lite’ package is $15 per month. You get 5 clients, estimates, unlimited invoices, expense tracking, time tracking, online credit card payments and expenses can be imported from your bank account.
The ‘Plus’ package costs $25 per month. It has all the ‘Lite’ tier features, plus 50 clients, late fees for overdue accounts, payment reminders, accounting reports, recurring invoice scheduling and you can send proposals.
The ‘Premium’ tier costs $50 per month and gives you up to 500 clients.
There's also an optional add-on for $10 per person per month, which means you can add team members to your account.
You can reduce these fees by 10% if you pay yearly.
If you have more than 500 clients FreshBooks Select might be for you. This includes all of the features of FreshBooks Premium, but adds more users and more features, such as advanced payments, QuickBooks and Xero integrations, and a dedicated account manager.
FreshBooks Payments: This allows you to accept payments from most major credit cards directly from your invoices. Payment processing costs 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction for most credit cards.
‘One of the most useful apps for running your business on the go’. Rhonda Abrams USA Today
‘FreshBooks is the perfect tool for businesses who have hundreds of clients and customers whom they invoice regularly. It removes the need to manually send invoices to clients and customers, by streamlining inputted information to create an automated invoicing system which keeps clients and customers up to date with their bills.It is also a great tool for managing expenses, especially for companies with different teams working on varying projects, ensuring these teams do not exceed the budget ceiling’. Sandra Ikegwuonu, Sterling Bank
QuickBooks offers more features than FreshBooks and the features are more robust. QuickBooks is a great fit for companies selling products and who need a scalable, robust accounting software. FreshBooks is a great fit for service-based businesses and freelancers who need to track their expenses and revenue.
FreshBooks has 3 plans: Lite ($15), Plus ($25), and Premium ($50). All plans include basic accounting features like payment processing, invoicing and time tracking.
FreshBooks is perfect for small business owners who are looking for a basic, user-friendly accounting tool to do invoicing and expense tracking.
FreshBooks is cloud-based. Rest assured it uses secure servers to ensure all client payments and data is safe.
Not directly, but Freshbooks does integrate with Gusto which will take care of your payroll.
No, but it directly integrates with Stripe.
If you need to send recurring invoices, want to track time, or you run a subscription model business, FreshBooks could be a great solution for you.
They offer extensive integrations with many applications. Regular secure backups are included, and their mobile app means you can keep track of your business finances wherever you are.
FreshBooks is ideal for small to mid sized businesses who want an easy to use, basic accounting solution.
It's missing some features, such as user permissions and accounts payable, so if you need these, then you should check out one of Freshbooks’ competitors, such as Quickbooks or Xero.
We hope this Freshbooks Review has helped you decide if it's the tool for you. If you're still on the fence, why not use the free trial and see if you like it, before committing.