Freshbooks, Easy to Use Invoicing for Small Businesses

5 Years of Using Freshbooks

I am just wrap­ping up my 5^th year in busi­ness as I write this blog (April 2009 is when I incor­po­rat­ed). When I opened my doors for busi­ness I knew I need­ed two pro­grams to help get me going and not cost a lot of mon­ey. I turned to Google Apps for Busi­ness to run my emails, con­tacts and cal­en­dars. I then need­ed a pro­gram that would send esti­mates, invoic­es and track my busi­ness expens­es. I land­ed on Fresh­books. My web design­er, David Guy, was using it at the time and loved it. So the deci­sion was easy and it is where I plan to stay as I start my 6^th year in busi­ness.

Can A Con­trac­tor Use Freshbooks?

Since my embrac­ing and using of Fresh­books a lot of fan­tas­tic invoic­ing and account­ing (cloud-based) pro­grams have sur­faced. I have tried most of them. The ones list­ed below all have their place in the mar­ket and are high qual­i­ty products. 

• XERO (an excel­lent pro­gram for my industry)
• SageOne (haven’t tried this one in awhile)
• Kashoo
• Wave Account­ing (sim­i­lar to Mint​.com for business…free too)
• And of Course there is: Quick­books Online

Most con­trac­tors I know have set­tled on Quick­books or Quick­books Online and are hap­py with the prod­ucts over­all. It makes sense for most con­trac­tors to stick with a trust­ed com­pa­ny like Intu­it. They real­ly are the leader in the small busi­ness account­ing world. I have had a few con­trac­tors use Fresh­books for some more sea­son­al busi­ness­es (like Christ­mas lights) because it is real­ly just a sim­ple sys­tem for send­ing esti­mates, invoic­es and receiv­ing pay­ments online. Even though I per­son­al­ly use and LOVE Fresh­books, I’d say that most con­trac­tors should prob­a­bly con­sid­er Quick­books as their billing solu­tion. It would be dif­fi­cult to switch between the two pro­grams. Fresh­books does not offer some of the key fea­tures, like Job Cost­ing. Fresh­books does have a num­ber of plu­g­ins and inte­gra­tions, as does Quick­books. So if you real­ly do want a sim­ple solu­tion to start, check out their Add Ons Page. I tried Quick­books for myself for awhile, but stayed with Fresh­books for 3 reasons: 

1. My accoun­tant approved
2. My cus­tomers have nev­er once com­plained about using it to pay their bills
3. It is a piece of cake to use.

So, if you hap­pened upon this post in search for a very sim­ple and easy to use invoic­ing sys­tem, Fresh­books takes the cake. If you need a more robust account­ing sys­tem with a lot of bells and whis­tles, try Quick­books (for con­trac­tors) or check out Xero.