FreshBooks

FreshBooks is an accounting software as a service with good extensibility allowing you connect to a lot of different third party software as well. You can make FreshBooks a hub for all of your business operations. The core functionality is very good you can accomplish a lot very easily from your account. The user interface is very easy to use and quick to learn. Everything is at your finger tips ready for the next step quite intuitively. The core components add up to allow you to use this service for more than just time tracking but that feature works great. It's easy to track billable time against projects and customers with the ability to create and send invoices. It's also easy to manage it as well as your invoicing and track your expenses and revenue. It's a huge time saving tool with a very minimal learning curve which is great because most of us would rather be running our businesses rather than accounting. The invoicing notification reminders are a very flexible feature and it saves you time when collecting late payments. The end user experience is great too your customers they can click links in their email to view invoicing and are able to login to a private branded portal which looks very professional if that's their thing. Compared to using Word files for invoices or Excel spreadsheets for accounting FreshBooks is a dream come true. It removes the need for these basically at all unless you want to import the data from them into FreshBooks ongoing. If you're not an accountant which I am not it's impressive the level of ease you have doing it with this software. There's never moments you don't know how to take the next steps.

I find it slightly odd that they don't make use of the space on the page. Somehow it's okay their balance of information is very good still and there menus are labeled and not made cryptic with the use of unique symbols. So overall it's very minor because it works but if you expanded the current view to utilize this space it could be easier for some folks to read. I'm researching these softwares for our new startup there's a need to find the very best and FreshBooks looks very good but I've noticed a consistent pattern regarding the reviews of their bank accounts and credit cards not being as functional as the rest of it or not working seamlessly with not as much accountability by FreshBooks for this as it relies heavily on third party support. But I'm still new and still considering whether to connect accounts. I do not notice a way to import spreadsheet based data into your account. Perhaps it's there but after a couple minutes of looking around it was not apparent.

Overall, I believe this software is great for non-accountants and probably so so for accountants in that the configuration capabilities are relatively limited. There's no custom fields and advanced approvals but it has the basics in every regard you need to get going very quickly. I like the robust features which are included it's nice to have a relatively complete solution and not have to continuously login to other services. Which brings me to the extensibility which is very good. You have to love the amount of ways you can connect your business to digital signature services, customer relationship managements softwares, email marketing services, third party payroll and time tracking services and more so there not forcing a lot of their functionality on you and there's room to grow with it. Being hosted online you can access it anywhere you have an internet connection so that makes it mobile accessible. The pricing is surprisingly affordable considering the complicated nature of the tasks at hand. This software makes them all a whole lot easier and I recommend checking out their free trial during your research to know if it's the best overall fit for you.