Top FreshBooks Alternatives and Overview

One of the biggest challenges of accounting is to use a product like MS Word or Excel. To deal with such issues, a dedicated accounting product is the best bet, that can ease the entire work of typing and creating invoices, billings, and other such stuff. Such products include features from simple invoice creation to billing, payrolls, ledgers, trial balance, and much more. Their reach and work output can be enhanced with the use of integrations too.

Among many such accounting products, FreshBooks grabs the top row with its interactive and in-depth accounting services. Developed since 2003 in a basement, FreshBooks is now one of the most used accounting tools. As per FreshBooks’ claims, they have 24 million+ users in 160+ countries. It has gotten many awards for its essential services and customer support. It validates top integrations like HubSpot, Dropbox, Fund box, Stripe, Zapier, Slack, Shopify, etc. FreshBooks has been even featured by Forbes, CNN, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, etc.

Are you a freelancer or a small-scale firm that cannot invest in a professional accountant? Is it so that you have been using a tracking tool but find it lacking because of its inability to create and track invoices? Well, for both the situations, FreshBooks can prove to be a more than satisfactory solution. It is a simple and efficient tool capable of doing much more accounting tasks than just invoicing.

FreshBooks is the brainchild of the entrepreneur Mike McDerment who mistakenly saved an invoice in MS Word and was frustrated with it for invoicing tasks. Founded in Toronto in 2003 with three founders, FreshBooks is today growing with more than 60 employees. It is one of the highly popular cloud-based programs offering intuitive and easy-to-use built-in tools for invoicing, time keeping, expense tracking, and standard project management.

With this software, you can view the invoices that are sent or are being paid, effortlessly track outstanding invoices, send reminders, and resend invoices automatically at fixed intervals. The program is frequently updated without any charge and that it is available for PC, Mac, and mobile systems.

User Interface

Once you sign up by simply submitting your name and email ID, you are taken to your account’s core called the dashboard. It is quite neat and smartly organized. All navigation options exist in the top-right grey menu and the blue navigation menu. The Overview sub-menu under Home in blue menu has a snap of all activities for creating new things such as clients, invoices, and teams.

The blue menu is the main one through which you can create estimates, send and search invoices, track working time, manage expenses, see financial reports, and edit client details. The dashboard also allows a personalized URL 'yourname.FreshBooks.com’, which is commendable.

FreshBooks Accounting Services

FreshBooks Accounting services start with the invoicing feature. It supports customizable invoices, payment reminders, late fees, recurring invoices, due dates, multi-currency billing, and credit card payments. You can also create deposits, duplicate invoices, do automatic taxes, retainers, and much more stuff. Similarly, FreshBooks Expenses solution offers receipt attachments, tax-friendly offers, UI friendly summary, vendor list, and editable expenses.

Invoicing

The software supports auto-billing, client statements, auto payment reminders, recurring invoices, and automatic thank you notifications when your client pays. These services are multilingual. It also allows applying late fees and discounts to invoice amounts and accepting partial payments. There are two invoice templates to choose. Well, this restricts customization significantly.

FreshBooks Payments is another core feature for accounting that has user-friendly UI, automatic payment and expense recording, auto-billing, and recurring payments, fast bank deposits, ACH bank transfer, and other payment infrastructure. This is another reason for FreshBooks’ accounting success. You can also create client lists, contact info, client communication, etc. A direct add-on from Google Contacts help creates this list faster.

You can even accept payments online through one of the software’s 14 supported gateways. For avoiding processing fees for credit card payments, you can set PayPal for accepting bank payments. Linking to third parties for payments is something that very rare accounting programs offer.

Tracking

You can track both expenses and time. The software allows importing expenses from bank statements for linking them to invoices although it lacks full bank reconciliation feature. This makes it easier to charge clients for the services associated to their projects. You can even track time dedicated to a project so that you can bill precisely at hourly rate. Even employees and contractors can track their time as well.

Estimates

FreshBooks Estimates & Proposal helps with making rich proposals, e-signatures, online estimate proposals, and estimate to invoice conversion. The Time Tracking feature of FreshBooks details on daily breakdowns, tracked hour bills, logs timers and hours, and provides project and client tracking too. The in-built Project Manager offers team collaboration, file sharing, project conversations, due dates, and detailed overview.

You can create a new estimate after logging into your FreshBooks account for invoicing for a percentage of total pay upfront. For this, you need to select your client, submit the desired details, and track time for the work done for the project.

Reports

Accounting & Reports solution is what makes the core of FreshBooks. You can make general ledgers, sales tax summary, expense reports, account aging, invoices, and much more stuff. Other than this, balance sheets, trial balance, journal entries, account charts, bank reconciliation, and profit/loss calculations are also possible. Each of these features are also accessible via iPhone or Android devices.

FreshBooks does a quite commendable here with about 20 reports on offer, including P&L, time tracking, estimated billing, user summary, team timesheets, revenue by staff, and annual recurring revenue. A Balance Sheet also exists but you need to fill it manually except for Accounts Receivable. All the reports are downloadable in .XLS or .CSV format.

Third-Party Integrations

Apart from payment gateways, FreshBooks can be integrated quickly with other useful apps such as Gmail, Zendesk, QuickBooks, Quote Roller, and Basecamp. Developers can even utilize their own API to design their own apps to be integrated with FreshBooks. This means you can view and manage all accounting details at a single glance.

Security

With all invoicing and tracking tasks done online, the program comes with foolproof 256-bit SSL encryption through Cisco firewalls. It also performs vulnerability scanning on its servers for identifying and resolving a security threat, encryption for database storage, and intrusion detection.

Pros

Ease of use, clean interface, cloud-based accounting, faster payouts with several gateways, multiple currencies and languages, reliable manager, print support, intelligent time tracking, auto invoice and account updates for payments, useful add-ons and integrations, handy security, iPhone and Android support, diverse customer support options

Cons

Lacks double entry bookkeeping, no attachments to invoices, lacks invoice customization, costly for multiple staff members, no inventory tracking or payroll support, shorter trial period, lacks useful features such as job costing and invoice templates

Conclusion

Overall, FreshBooks is the first choice for freelancers and medium-sized businesses. For large organizations, it still needs lots of additional stuff, but for smaller and mid-range companies, FreshBooks has robust accounting services.

FreshBooks is ideal for those sole proprietorship firms and small businesses whose most income comes from invoiced services. Consider this invoicing and time tracking software if you work by charging your services on hourly basis. For larger businesses that need full accounting, FreshBooks can be a better option when used with a comprehensive accounting tool.

A perfect single-entry, cloud-based invoicing system for freelancers and business owners for whom payment is straightforward but lacks to be a full-fledge accounting software for those who follow the double entry tradition.

Company Name: 2ndSite Inc.

Company Address: 1655 Dupont St. Suite 250, Toronto, ON, Canada

Founded in: 2003