Editor’s Pick: Why FreshBooks Is A Great Accounting Solution For A Small Business
FreshBooks is a cloud accounting solution that helps small businesses to manage their financial tasks in a fast and secure manner. It allows for an easy way to deal with invoices, expenses, time tracking, and reports. The software was designed to save you time from cumbersome number crunching and to make the accounting process streamlined and automated. FreshBooks was created in 2003 out of the founder’s experience of overwriting an invoice and losing his job, which made him think of a better way to do accounting. Out of that need FreshBooks was born. Since then almost five million users have been using FreshBooks.
What Are The Highlights Of FreshBooks
- It’s one of the most popular cloud accounting apps for small business, used by five million customers worldwide
- It enables cloud invoicing to online payment gateway fast tracks collection
- You can snap a picture of receipts or link to bank for quick expense tracking
- You can transfer your timesheet data to invoice and collect payments faster
- It’s offers an award-winning customer support (Gold Winner, 2014 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service)
What we like about FreshBooks
It has great invoice to payment features
FreshBooks offers some great invoice to payment features that will be especially useful to small businesses. For example, it allows you to track exactly when your client has opened your invoice email. This is especially convenient for those companies that often deal with customers claiming they didn’t get the invoice. With FreshBooks you can always be certain that your invoices have been properly delivered to clients.
It’s also very easy to manage your billing history. Freshbooks offers a wide range of tools to keep track of past and current invoices. For example, you can quickly locate any unpaid invoices from previous months and there’s a very convenient feature to send automatic overdue payment reminders to your clients allowing you to always stay on top of your cash flow without the need to personally argue with each customer every time someone misses a payment.
Managing payments with FreshBooks is very flexible, as the software allows you to settle accounts with Visa, Mastercard, or Amex for credit card processing or you can use PayPal for online payments. With FreshBooks, cloud invoicing can be easily streamlined with an online payment gateway to give you a powerful and efficient tool to collect payments without the annoying need to discuss these issues directly with a client. For recurring billing, you can actually automate the whole process to save even more time. FreshBooks also provides multi-currency invoicing that lets you bill customers in local money.
It allows you to track expenses in a snap
This FreshBooks feature is a winner if you ever have to liquidate expenses after a client meeting: you simply snap a picture of the receipt and attach the image to an item in FreshBooks to log the expense. You can easily monitor which expense belongs to which client, or add the expense to an invoice as a reimbursement deal with a client. What is more, FreshBooks allows you to import expenses directly from your bank by linking the Expense Tool to your credit card or bank account. All this makes FreshBooks an ideal tool for tracking how much money your company spends every day.
It offers a detailed time tracking of work and payments
FreshBooks is an accounting tool that makes charging fees a detailed and verifiable process that will become very useful if you ever need to dispute a payment. Even if you’re out of office a sleek iOS or Android app that’s part of FreshBooks will let you precisely record your working time, down to every billable second if need be. It’s also extremely simple to change your work timesheet to an invoice and send it to client at on the fly. FreshBooks filling features are also very flexible: you can set time tracking to an hourly or flat rate depending on your project dynamics. What’s more, your team members can log in their time separately for each project to help you monitor individual and overall time progress and easily calculate a running bill for your clients.
It makes creating reports really easy
If you’re used to re-entering data one at a time in a spreadsheet, you’ll love how
FreshBooks lets you generate financial reports by simply processing data that you’ve already entered in the past. For example, generating a profit & loss report requires just a few clicks. Or you can quickly create an expense report allowing you to see things like this month’s total costs, or monitor your balance sheet in real-time. FreshBooks also makes taxation less of a hassle for your company. It allows you to filter through your financial records and easily generate accurate tax reports on things such as item sales, sales tax or tax summaries. It’s also possible to export your reports to a CSV file or other popular formats making them easy to share with an accountant or tax adviser.
What customers say about FreshBooks
We’ve gathered some actual customer feedback about FreshBooks to find out what people who have been using the software have to say about it. Freshbooks customers are mostly small business owners or freelance providers and one of frequently opinions about it is how easy it makes billing for recurring invoices. For example, Liza, a designer clothing consultant from Chicago shared her experience:
“My first reason to get FreshBooks was to organize our invoice schedule because we have over 100 recurring monthly invoices. It used to take me a week’s work just to process and track all these bills in a spreadsheet. After using it for a few months, we tried collecting through PayPal. That’s when I realized I was not using the software’s full capacity. I was amazed how FreshBooks cut the invoicing to payment process time. I use a template, schedule the email and late payment alerts, and voila! I just check my PayPal at weekends to see how much we get.”
Another characteristics of FreshBooks that is often mentioned by its clients is how it helps a small business project a professional image of a big enterprise, which is so often critical to get big contracts. One of the most basic reasons is that you can put your company logo in the invoice. One of FreshBooks clients, an owner of a small California-based publishing house noticed:
“I like how it makes me look professional. Not just because I can put my logo in my invoice (I can do that in Word), but for doing the dirty job of sending reminders to late payers. I never liked calling my clients and argue for payments. It made me look like begging for crumbs. FreshBooks took that stress out and, more importantly, now I don’t get to feel bad with a client because I don’t have to call them up to collect, but only to discuss a project.”
We’d like to add to that point the fact that FreshBooks gives you the ability to send invoices in a way that looks like someone else is doing it for you, making your company seem a big enterprise with a separate accounting department. This often creates a buffer zone, that it lets you nag the client for late payments while still keeping a friendly marketing persona when dealing with the client face-to-face.
Awards and Quality Certificates Won By FreshBooks
Verified Quality Seal
FreshBooks was thoroughly reviewed by a panel of B2B software experts and awarded the Verified Quality Seal. The seal is a unique product certificate that FinancesOnline awards only to products that meet the quality requirements set out by their experts. The seal is intended to give potential B2B clients interested in buying a product and it shows that FreshBooks is an accounting software that offers a high quality of services. We have also made sure to verify the vendors’ credentials highlighting it’s a fully legitimate business. Finally, we analyzed Freshbooks customer support level to make sure it meets our quality benchmarks. FreshBooks was able to pass all of our quality requirements showing clearly that users can expect great features and equally great customer support from it.
Experts’ Choice Award
After our experts closely investigated what FreshBooks has to offer feature by we’ve decided to highlight its top performance with our Experts’ Choice Award. We have put Freshboks through a series of tests by our reviewers specifially to evaluate the efficiency of accounting software. The tests involved a group of problem scenarios a typical business should be able to deal with a quality accounting software. We were very satisfied with FreshBook’s ability to quickly and effectively solve each problem we threw at it. Results of our extensive testing make us confident that FreshBooks clients can expect to be using one of the best accounting tools in the market today. FreshBooks’ cloud invoicing to online payment process is top notch, offering small business owners a most feasible way to improve their bottom line. FreshBooks’ auto-generated business and tax reporting also empowers small companies to see the big picture without missing the details.
Great Customer Support Certificate
After subjecting FreshBooks’ customer reps to close scrutiny with actual phone calls and emails to resolve various issues, our panel of reviewers found them to merit the Best Customer Support Certificate which signifies that FrashBooks’ staff is there to help you deal with any problems you may have both quickly and efficiently. We were really satisfied with how fast and proactive their response our test problems was. An agent even guided us on how to open a PayPal account so we could maximize the cloud accounting feature. After a careful evaluation we can say with certainty that FreshBooks is not only your ticket to great features, but also to great customer service.
Recommended for Small Business Certificate
After taking an in-depth look at how FreshBooks has empowered small business owners worldwide for twelve years since its original release we decided that it fully deserves to be granted our Recommended For Small Business certificate. We gathered feedback from small business owners using FreshBooks to find a pattern in their user experiences. We found out that most FreshBooks users quote two recurring reasons that seem to make the software perfect for small businesses: the ability to streamline invoicing to collection to fast track payments; and the professional look That lets small businesses using FreshBooks act like a big company and get better deals. Our Recommended For Small Business certificate is a solid sign that choosing FreshBoks as your accounting software will surely allow you to reap the same benefits already enjoyed by five million happy users of FreshBooks.
FreshBooks SmartScore and Customer Satisfaction
Our experts have conducted a full review of FreshBooks’ features, user feedback, customer service, and other key aspects. Using our SmartScore system we gave FreshBooks a very satisfying score of 9.1/10, while our Customer Satisfaction Algorithm estimates the overall user satisfaction rating for the software at 97%.
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