FreshBooks Review

As an online business service, FreshBooks is one of the best accounting software you can find in the industry. It encompass an accounting tool, time tracking capabilities and invoicing features in just one product.

How your business is going, at a glance.

Usability

FreshBooks’ design hasn’t changed so much in the last few years, but remains very simple and efficient: with a tabbed navigation menu, it can be both easy to use and thorough displaying all the information you need to enter to record an expense or start invoicing. Its developers has spent an awful lot of time and energy to make a business, accounting service understandable for everyone, especially those who are not familiar with bookkeeping or accounting, or even hate it, and they succeeded. (We only think that they should reduce the use of shadows in the service.)

Features

Freshbooks is first and foremost an accounting service, so you can record your expenses and track your payments. It can pull data from your bank or credit card account, so you don’t have to input manually them – which is a big time saver. It integrates with a few payment gateway such as PayPal, Stripe and Authorize.net and even provide its secure payment system so you can get paid by your clients directly. It costs less than PayPal or Authorize.net, and roughly the same as Stripe. Speaking of payment services, Freshbooks integrates seamlessly with the major e-commerce platform such as Magento or Shopify.
Invoicing is another feature you’d expect from a business service like FreshBooks, especially given that it first debuted as an invoicing tool. You can create estimates and quotes and convert them into invoices for your clients, applying different tax rates or different taxes for a particular entry. You can also invoice the time you spend on specific project or task, using FreshBooks built-in timer feature.

Easily track your expenses with FreshBooks.

You can set two user levels for staff members that can add expenses or timesheet, but haven’t accessed to the rest of the software, and you can also let your accountant. FreshBooks grants you even limited control over your inventory, but this is not a core feature of the product, so you have to use some other inventory management software or service.

Support

FreshBooks support is really top-notch. You can reach them by phone or mail, participate to their webinar, and find answers to your doubts diving deep into their knowledge base. FreshBooks can help you also finding an accountant or bookkeeper in your area, which isn’t quite the same as what LeanAccounting does, providing an accountant for an extra monthly fee, but we liked it very much.

Track your time and then invoice your clients with the built-in timer.

Price

FreshBooks includes a 30-days free trial to let you test its service. Then you can choose between three different paid plans, which differ basically on the quantity of clients you can add and additional staff members. There’s a discount for an annual billing instead of the monthly one.