Freshbooks Review, Features, and Alternatives

If you’re looking for your best solution for your invoicing and accounting for your business then Freshbooks is all you’ll ever need.

What are the people raving about Freshbooks?

⭐ Freshbooks

It’s cloud-based accounting software that there’s no need for those tedious downloads and installation. Be able to run your business seamlessly, easily, quickly, and securely.

Time is precious in this fast-paced world we live in now and you’ll get to spend less time doing your accounting tasks. Have more time in your hands to do other things you love and enjoy.

In every business, invoicing is the key to collect and get money.

Pros:

• It’s easy to use of use and it does not have complexity when using it.
• You can integrate credit cards and other accounts and efficiently track all your capital.
• Its technical support is very attentive and will be with you always supporting you with any problem and will be with you until you solve the problem
• It has made invoicing just like fun and accounting tasks so easy.
• It plays a very significant role in terms of generating effective reports.
• It is equally helpful for beginners.
• It helps in managing online stores perfectly.
• This could help in estimating the overall expense of the organization and you could be capable of having the insight views of every task that has been accomplished.
• Get paid by your clients using their credit cards
• You could easily send reminders to your customers about their delayed payments and automatically if needed you could notify them about the extra charges.
• You’ll be able to generate the receipt in real-time.
• This has provided great automation sense to generating the billings.
• It could create recurring invoices.
• The automatic expense capturing and the dashboard is a big plus.
• It offers a well developed, well designed, and intuitive interface that consists of a wide range of beautifully designed templates that help create invoices and give professional look to documents.

Cons:

• It costs more to obtain better benefits and features.
• More invoice templates, more supported currencies, and integration with Quickbooks online are requested
• The Freshbooks Classics have more features according to a few.

• FreshBooks

What are the benefits you gain from Freshbooks?

Automation saves you time and with Freshbooks, everything would be fast and easy from invoice reminders to the collection of payments. It’s like putting your business in autopilot and you have a lot of time to make your business thrive.

Freshbooks would give you the reports and insights you’ll need in your financials that could turn into a lot of potential smart business moves and choices for you!

Your business gets monetized sooner with you getting more ways to get paid. It makes paying invoices a smoother and faster experience with a wide range of availability of online payments.

What are the awesome features of Freshbooks?

Easy Invoicing

You’ll have professional looking invoices that are fast and easy to make. The faster you can create your invoices the faster it would be to you to turn it into cash. Freshbooks is one of the fastest if not the fastest invoice generator software you could have.

Your clients could pay you online using their credit cards and ACH and get paid 11 days faster! Reminders would be sent to your clients, follow-ups, and securely charging your client’s credit card. You’ll be able to charge all that is due to you and all expenses incurred since Freshbooks’ generator you can easily add your tracked time and expenses to your invoices so you’ll never anything unbilled.

You’ll have an established stable cashflow with retainers since negotiation takes place upfront with regards to fixed pricing and make it easier to forecast upcoming workload and income. Another great thing is you could get paid upfront with deposits and you don’t need to shell it out from your pocket by just request a deposit on your invoice and you’ll never have to worry about any expenses since you’ll get the money you need at the start.

Other fantastic invoicing features are you can add invoice due dates, customize invoice payment term, You can easily offer discounts, it automatically calculates taxes, preview invoices before sending, you can choose your preferred currency, get instant updates when an invoice has been viewed and paid, and invoice from anywhere with their mobile app.

Expenses

Track all your expenses and be organized. You’ll also be ready when paying taxes comes. It’s all ready and done for you. You can integrate and connect your bank account and credit card to Freshbooks and you will have an everyday update on all your spendings.

Keep all your outgoing payment’s receipt by just taking a photo of it and storing it at Freshbooks. You’ll know where your money goes all the time. Keep track of all your outgoing and incoming billable that makes you automatically pull them and invoice your client. All your project’s expenses are kept and organized too for your easy tracking.

Noteworthy features under Expenses are multi-currency expenses, auto-categorization of expenses, tax-friendly categories, easily assign recurring expenses, automatically import expenses from your bank, easily mark expenses to rebill to a client later snap and store pictures of receipts in the mobile app, and secure receipt storage in the cloud so mobile and desktop are always in sync.

Time Tracking

Be wherever you are and you could still track everything with Freshbooks mobile application that has Chrome Timer, FreshBooks that ensures you could bank every billable hour. Plus, you can track time directly from the apps you already know and love like Asana, Basecamp, Trello, and Teamwork.

You can also easily monitor how your team is doing and be able to identify all issues before it becomes unmanageable.

Includes all these wonderful features like timekeeping for your entire team, record time against a specific client, add detailed time entry notes, automatically bill for tracked hours, weekly and monthly views of your tracked time, track and manage time for a specific project, daily breakdowns of your tracked work hours, built-in and easy to use a timer on your desktop and mobile, and you’ll get to see other features to help keep you on track.

Projects

Accessible and easy project management and team collaboration software all in one for you to use so you could do it less the time and it enables you to collaborate with your team members to keep things moving forward and deliver amazing results in a jiff. It’s great for a small business with a team to boost their productivity. You invite and control which files your contractors, employees, and business partners can have access to.

Make all your important documents stored in a web-based centralized place and make
project planning to execute work easy and your clients could update you with their feedback that’s automatically stored in the cloud.

Other features for effortless project management such as chat and collaborate on work assign project due dates, quickly see an overview of project status, manage team projects and deliverables, invite your staff, clients, or contractors to a project, and share images and files from within FreshBooks.

Estimates

Fast custom estimates with ready-to-play invoices in a flash. you’ll save time billing and pocket your money sooner. It comes with customizable proposals outlining a project’s scope, timeline, and deliverables.  Impress your clients on how fast you deliver without the need to switch between other apps or emails.

No wonder Freshbooks is trusted in 120 countries worldwide.

Other estimation features include track estimate status from viewed to accepted, turn an estimate into an invoice the ability for your clients to accept an estimate online, view and respond to client feedback about an estimate, preview estimates and quotes before sending, easily add a discount.

You could send estimates in your preferred currency, create and email an estimate from anywhere with the Freshbooks mobile app, and easy to customize so you can look professional and showcase your brand.

Payments

It’s convenient since you can accept payments online and get paid in lesser time waiting. It makes it easier for your clients to pay invoices, which means you get your money faster.

Your customers could pay directly through invoices and automatically records each payment in your account. It’s fast, easy, secure, and perfectly integrated. Freshbooks has more payment options with no hidden fees attached to them. You’ll always know exactly how much money you’re taking in because FreshBooks Payments, Stripe, and ACH pricing are very transparent.

Each transaction cost is lowered with your preferred ACH and credit card transaction rates, a dedicated Account Manager, customized training for you and your team, and much more. It only takes one click to accept credit card payments and a little more process for Freshbooks to deposit your money into your desired account. FreshBooks Advanced Payments lets you accept credit card payments online, in-person and over the phone.

You can enjoy these perks plus more like saving credit card info for easy billing later, set up recurring billing profiles for specific clients, and add automation and create subscription-based client profiles. And there are more features like it offers clients flexibility with payment schedules and partial payments, request deposits to control your cash flow, accept international currencies with stripe, auto-generated payments collected reports.

It doesn’t stop there, it also enables Fast and easy bank deposits, payment options include VISA, MasterCard, AMEX, Apple Pay, and processing fees are automatically imported as expenses.

There’s an 80% of users that accept online payments and they swear, it improves their relationships with their clients.

Accounting

Freshbooks is equipped with Easy-To-Use Double-Entry Accounting Tools that could ensure and attest accuracy, prove compliance, prepare easy to understand financial reports, make smart choices for your business, and easily work with your accountant.

With double-entry accounting it’s capable to identify revenue items and their related expenses, giving you an accurate calculation of profits and losses. It automatically checks and balances that your debit and credit amounts are equal, which greatly reduces the chance of any all errors year-round and makes filing your taxes easy as a breeze.

It includes all your Accounting needs and tools and comes complete with balance sheet, trial balance, general ledger, cost of goods sold, other income (interest, rental income, etc.), chart of accounts, accountant access, and journal entries.

Everything is automated and even your accountant would be content to use it and it makes your bank reconciliation more organized.

More things could be achieved in Freshbooks as all financial transactions could be imported and categorized, easily approve automated matching suggestions, or make changes and additions, equity, transfers, and refunds are easily marked and categorized, and create a summary report.

Reports

Straightforward and simple financial reports that are very detailed and easy to understand. See at a glance at how your business is doing. Your dashboard would all have the answers.

You can conveniently access important reports like profit and loss and skip the math part in just a click. All your numbers and figures are all laid-out and even your taxes would be filed on time and effortless on your part.

Here are all the data and reports that would be covered: color-coded breakdown of spending, summary of most recent activity, profit and loss report, sales tax summary report, accounts aging report, payments collected report, accounting reports with completely detailed general ledger, trial balance, chart of accounts, expense report invoice details report, report filtering by the client, team member, or date, and save, export or print financial reports for your accountant.

Be part of the small business owners that experienced tax time being less stressful since they used FreshBooks.

Mobile

Be a walking and mobile office with your smartphone. Be in-sync with your business wherever you may be. You don’t need to be glued to your office. Stay connected and do your accounting anywhere you might be!

Send your client an invoice right from their office and get paid by the time you get home. Capture all your receipts and be free from paper trails. Be on the go and yet be able to answer your clients’ inquiries and feedback right from this mobile Accounting application. It makes you updated with everything about your business projects and dealings.

The Freshbooks mobile would let you create and send professional invoices snap pictures of receipts, manage expenses on the go and coming soon to Android too, stay on top of important updates, chat with clients, and data synced across all devices.

Alternatives to Freshbooks

⭐ Quickbooks Online

On top of the list is which is also a cloud-based accounting system for small businesses that allows users to track income and expenses, generate invoices, and enable online billing.

Their difference lies in how they bill their users. FreshBooks pricing is based on the number of billable clients, while QuickBooks Online charges more for additional functionality such as inventory tracking and 1099 preparation.

Pros:

• Its system has a quick reporting capability.
• Real-time updating.
• Medium user-friendly.
• Projections and reports.
• QuickBooks Online integrates with all major banks, making adding transactions quick and easy.

Cons:

• Its platform lacks functionality found on its desktop product.
• It would be nice if the terminology is more simple and straightforward.
• It sometimes takes days and days to receive the money that you are sent, meaning that sending payments through your bank could likely be quicker and easier.

• Intuit

⭐ Xero

Xero, another cloud-based platform designed for small businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers.

It offers budgeting functionality aside from billing and invoicing. You can run payroll with Xero up to ten employees. Small business owners could integrate some of their accounting and HR needs in one system.

Pros:

• User-friendly
• Quote converts to the invoice.
• Design templates can be uploaded for documents.
• Email templates can be added.
• Easy reconciliation through the bank feed.
• Great for small biz and with simple reporting needs only.

Cons:

• No time tracking included but can be integrated.
• The app does not update straight away and when looking at the P+L, and it doesn’t show the same figures as it does in the browser in real-time.
• Multiple entities may be difficult to manage using software like this because it will not consolidate financial records

• Xero

⭐ Wave

Wave’s invoicing, accounting, and personal finance tools are completely free thanks to partnerships with companies such as American Express and Dell. This boosts the platform’s popularity.

Pros:

• Its mobile app is great to keep the business going anywhere.
• It has bank upload and reconciliations.
• Good reports for a free system.
• Good customer and supplier reconciliation features for a free system.
• It would allow you to create new categories while other applications don’t

Cons:

• Integration and data migration from other systems aren’t always smooth.
• They are adding new features to the system but it’s still very behind other software systems.
• Some design aspects could be improved upon in their document creation.
• There are aspects in its interface that are hard to use and are not as intuitive as they should be.

• Wave

After Thoughts

FreshBooks has what it takes to be one of the top accounting software available that many of them small business owners trust and are using this cloud-based system to track billable hours, capture expenses and enable online invoicing and payment.

Try and experience Freshbooks abundant great features to make your accounting chores like a walk in the park for good.

FreshBooks is so easy to use and has an amazing customer service to add to its feather. It’s worth it and it would take you and your business where you owe to be. On top!