FreshBooks Review

As a small company owner, one of the first and most critical things you’re going to invest in is invoicing accounting software. Now clearly, in 2017, software in the classic sense, doesn’t really exist anymore. Most software or applications are hosted in the cloud, and FreshBooks was one of the first accounting software to provide that service totally cloud-based.

So, let’s have a look and examine FreshBooks in detail, and see whether it’s worth your hard-earned cash. As soon as you log in to FreshBooks for the first time, you receive the dashboard each time you log in. Here you receive a detailed but also short summary of your overall financial condition for your firm.

Starting at the top with outstanding income, all of your clients who still owe you money and haven’t paid bills, and you may check in numerous currencies. If you continue further down, you may receive a quick summary of your overall earnings anywhere from month to month, or by quarter, for any period since you began your firm.

And if you go further down, you can keep track of your expenditures for the same time frames, from any point of time beginning and end, any currency, and divides the costs down into categories to obtain a fast picture of where you’re spending your money. Then if you look to the bottom, the final feature is the advanced reports.

This is one of the best things FreshBooks provides. It simply takes all of your data, and with one click, you can obtain these rapid, powerful reports that provide you more insight into your company. So, here is the overall aesthetic of the dashboard. It’s a terrific method to assess where your firm is financially.

Decent accounting software is only as good as its invoicing capabilities.

Thankfully, because FreshBooks began its start with merely invoicing, that’s where most of its features can be found.

So, let’s have a look at what it takes to make an invoice in FreshBooks.

As you can see, FreshBooks sort of has this Weebly feel to it where you can really see what the invoice would look like on the live preview as you add information to it. Obviously, all the fundamentals are present: client information, date issued, due dates, customizable invoice numbers, your logo, and your brand.

All the fundamentals in invoicing are present, but additionally, you get extra options on the side.

Simple stuff like taking credit cards is incredibly easy to implement only with a simple click and then you can pick whatever payment processor you want.

We’ll speak a little bit about it later on. Other aspects include modifying the invoice design, you may personalize it to your own brand, colors, and alternative fonts, as well.

My favorite tool is the Make Recurring where essentially if you have a client sending out invoices that are exactly the same every month, you can set it up to send automatically and then automatically charge the customer. That’s incredibly beneficial if you’re selling items like subscriptions because it’s the same invoices, and the same costs every single month. We’ll speak about it a little bit more later as well.

Other features include sending late payment reminders, customizable, imposing late fees, and of course, many, hundreds of currencies you may pick from to charge your clients in. Everything you need to invoice your clients correctly may be found here.

Then you may after the invoice is done, you can submit it through e-mail or even conventional mail. So, everything you need to invoice may be found here.

There’s a variety of ways you may accept money with FreshBooks.

Obviously, except for the usual means of things like cash, debit cards, and cheques, where you can merely manually input the payment later.

But then, it’s 2017, and everyone uses credit cards, you can also take credit cards via invoicing.

There are really two methods you can accomplish it; one is FreshBooks payments, which is clearly FreshBooks' own payment processor, and the other is Stripe. They both have the same processing fees, which are 2.9 percent + 30 cents for every transaction. The primary difference between the two is Stripe normally is better and provides you customization, it’s better to handle subscriptions for your clients.

If you’re selling a lot of things where you’re charging a subscription each and every month, Stripe performs a better job at handling that. With minor things like, simply being able to even input your client’s credit card information yourself and having control over it. You can accomplish it using Stripe. With FreshBooks, in order to get a credit card number in there, the consumer needs to do it themselves.

So, it may be especially unpleasant if you have established a client base, and you had to migrate over to FreshBooks. All of your clients that you have right now, would have to then put their credit cards in and opt-in to being automatically invoiced every single month. Most people wouldn’t want like that, I know I don’t want like that.

I would personally go with Stripe, but clearly, it’s up to you. The biggest error, I would say here, is that FreshBooks got rid of the opportunity to collect money via PayPal. With FreshBooks classic, you can do that but the newly re-designed FreshBooks got away from that, and it looks like they did so to push users to use FreshBooks payments. I believe that’s a major mistake.

I know why they want people to use their own payment processor but you don’t achieve that by removing rid of things that are already available and attempting to push users to do it. That’s certainly the greatest downside I’ve encountered so far with FreshBooks. But other than that, taking credit cards is incredibly simple with FreshBooks. In business, you had to track how you’re producing money, but also how you’re spending it.

So, you want to make sure you remain on top of your costs, and FreshBooks can allow you to achieve that. It’s all entirely automatic. All you have to do is just link to your bank or credit card accounts and have all of the spendings from those accounts automatically imported into FreshBooks and classified as you can see above. Connecting the accounts is as easy as signing in from here.

FreshBooks states they support over 14,000 financial institutions so there’s a very strong probability that your account will be supported. So, spending tracking- is very simple with FreshBooks. If you have a team of workers or contractors that you deal with frequently, you presumably use some form of project management application. FreshBooks actually has a project management function integrated into the accounting software that enables you to essentially keep track of your team members and contractors and to better work with them.

It enables you to monitor the hours clocked by yourself and by your team members and allows you to convert those timed hours automatically into invoices to charge your customers. It also includes a lovely small collaboration feature where you can input messages and exchange documents and basic stuff like photos. Basically sort of like Dropbox, in fact, it may go to be a wonderful small alternative for Dropbox if all you need is a simple solution to keep things centralized and interact with your team members.

It’s a lovely little accent to what looks like for clients. FreshBooks appears like simply an invoicing and accounting tool, but it contains excellent extra features like this one. If you provide services like consulting, you have to charge your customers by the hour, FreshBooks time tracking function can perform all this for you. It’s a basic timer that helps you keep track of all the time that you spend working for customers.

Most importantly, it enables you to share that time with those customers so they know precisely what they’re paying for. Simple timers that you can click to get you started and then once you’ve recorded the time and logged it, all you have to do is click generate an invoice and any unbilled hours here just in a matter of one or two clicks, you can convert that unbilled time into an invoice and send it off to your clients.

One of my favorite aspects of FreshBooks is its sophisticated reporting tool.

With only a few clicks I can obtain a complete picture of how my firm sits in a range of areas. If I want to know how much I’m truly earning, and fill out a profit and loss report, then in just 2 seconds I know precisely how much money I’ve earned so far, this year. Indicating currencies of course I can switch to check how much money I’ve earned since last quarter in America and it tells me precisely that as well.

In other reports like expenditure reports, you know precisely where you’re spending the money when you launched the company or at least when you started using FreshBooks. And all of these are only a few clicks away, data that’s already you’re already entering into FreshBooks, and FreshBooks is converting it into helpful insights so you know precisely what’s going on in your company.

Something that not enough firms do these days, that’s already at your disposal. FreshBooks make that very simple with their sophisticated reporting. With so many online tools and resources accessible to us these days you need an invoicing and accounting platform that plays nicely with others. FreshBooks luckily does exactly that. It combines with so many other tools.

Some of these you probably already utilize on a day-to-day basis. These like e-commerce platforms, Shopify, payment processors like Stripe as we covered before, and payroll providers like Gusto, or CRS that you probably utilize in your day-to-day sales particularly if you’re selling digital items. FreshBooks is connected with so many products and platforms that little doubt it would play nicely with whatever you’re currently using. FreshBooks also has its own dedicated mobile app.

So, I don’t have one of those fancy phone screen recorders to show you exactly how it works in motion, but from all the testing that I’ve done, it seems FreshBooks mobile app does pretty much everything the desktop version can do, other than the reports, you can’t seem to generate reports from your mobile app. But honestly, I can’t imagine we don’t need to do that. But everything else, invoicing, costs, recording payments, and monitoring and importing those expenses, can all be done from your mobile app whether on android or iOS. FreshBooks' price is quite competitive with the industry standard, including foundation shops like QuickBooks.

The wonderful part about their 3-tier payment membership plans is that each of these plans has all the features, they don’t lock away any functions behind the finest packages. It ultimately simply boils down to how many customers you have. So, with the low plan, you can have up to 5 customers, the Plus, you can have up to 50, and with the premium, you can have up to 500. FreshBooks gives a completely 30-day free trial so you can give it a go for a month and see if you like it, if you don’t there’s no commitment and you can cancel it.

They also, of course, offer a premium plan called FreshBooks choose as it states here charges for over 5,000 dollars a month in credit card payments. So, if you accept a lot of online payments you may receive both the FreshBooks pick option and get a cheaper transaction cost, and you get a better rate. FreshBooks' cost, is extremely competitive, I haven’t discovered truly any invoicing systems out there that are cheaper for the number of features that FreshBooks provide. So, it’s an excellent value in my perspective. Sometimes you’re going to get stuck, and when you do you’re going to want assistance.

Most organizations these days when it comes to customer assistance split it down into 2 areas; communication and self-serve. FreshBooks when it comes to communication, you may either e-mail them or give them a call. There are some very big statements here when it comes to their phone customer assistance. They claim they’ll pick up the phone after 4 rings. I tried this and someone picked it up after 5. Probably not anything to weep about, 5 rings is still considerably quicker than most customer service you receive these days. Their e-mail assistance is also fairly rapid I’ve had answers within a couple of hours after

I wrote them an e-mail. But they also have the frequently asked questions area which would be the self-serve, self-help portion. So, huge knowledge is based on the most frequent difficulties and inquiries clients have. They’ve got a fantastic search tool here so if you have a particular query, you could write it in here and it’ll likely turn up. Honestly, most difficulties that I’ve encountered were addressed via the self-serve portion. Really, any solid knowledge base should be able to accomplish that.

That is the purpose of it.

Again, I’ve had amazing customer service with FreshBooks, they’re really prompt and very simple to locate answers, received absolutely no difficulties, so far.

I adore FreshBooks, I truly do. I’ve been using them ever since I launched my web design marketing firm a few years ago. They’ve been with me from the beginning and they satisfy all of my requirements and then some. With that said, it’s definitely geared primarily toward smaller firms and a lot of freelancers.

If you have a big company or if you have a lot of specialized accounting demands, for example, if you have a staff that requires payroll, then FreshBooks definitely isn’t a suitable option for you. But if you’re a small business or freelancer, you want a clean, simple, beautiful way to invoice your customers and track your profit and loss, track your expenses, collaborate with your teams, and track your time and you have to bill your clients by billed hours, I don’t think why you’ll pick anything else other than FreshBooks. So, give it a try now, and sample their 30-day free trial. You don’t even have to input a credit card for it to register, simply try for 30 days and if you don’t like it you can easily go on to something else.