Summary: FreshBooks is a cloud-based invoicing software that allows you to create professional and best-looking invoices for your clients. It allows you to customize the invoice based on your business needs, including applying late fees, requesting deposits, adding a markup price, and more. With the new Retainers feature, it makes it easier for you to bill your clients in advance on a recurring basis, keep track of your work time, and request payment for excess hours.
FreshBooks has been known for its excellent service in helping service providers bill their clients. With the invoicing system that offers many important features to help businesses ensure the on-time payment for their products and services, it gives your business a good way to streamline your workflow and manage your timeline better. Not only invoicing, FreshBooks also offers lots of other functionalities to keep the proper management of your business finances, including expense tracking, time tracking, project management, and accounting.
The services provided by FreshBooks are always being improved as time goes by. Lots of new features are being added to the platform, giving their users more and more convenience in managing various aspects of their business, so that they can focus more on things that matter the most, which is to deliver the best products and services for their clients. Whether you are providing service to first-time customers or repeat customers, the invoicing system provided by FreshBooks can give you the ease of mind of knowing that you will get paid on time, every time.
Recently, a new feature has been added to the FreshBooks functionality, which is called Retainers. It is a feature that allows you to bill your clients in advance for the work hours that you will spend for their projects. This new invoicing feature can be used to bill your clients on a recurring basis, making sure that you will get paid for each hour that you spend working on their projects.
Retainers Allow You To Forecast Your Income In Advance
With many types of business, especially service-based businesses, it can be difficult to forecast your income in advance. This is due to various factors. For instance, service-based businesses are unpredictable in terms of overall fees per project, as they will depend on how much time it is required to complete the project. So, each client might be billed differently depending on how complex or how time-consuming their project can go.
With Retainers, it becomes even more possible for you to forecast your income in advance. This is because you can calculate the allotted time for each client in advance and create invoice based on that calculation. You can set the price per hour, price for excess hours, and track the time required to complete the project.
Billing Excess Hours Can Be Done Easily Using This New Feature
With the regular invoicing method, you might not be able to calculate the excess hours that you have spent on your client’s project. This is no longer the case as Retainers can be used to track the alloted hours and time period that you have spent working with your clients. This means that any excess hours will be tracked, and the payment for such excess hours will be included on the invoice automatically.
Once the hours logged have surpassed the alloted time as defined originally on the Retainers, you will be given a notification that the excess hour billing has been started. The accumulated excess hours will also be added into the Retainers, updating the original invoice fees.
How Retainers Can Be Used To Manage Your Workload Better
The Retainers are the type of innovative invoicing method that is quite different from the regular invoice system provided by FreshBooks. With Retainers, all things related to the project that you are working for your client are logged within the invoice itself. This includes the progress or completion milestones that you have achieved within the project. Since there is an alloted time system, you can easily keep your clients informed about the progress while you are working on it.
With the addition of time management feature that is directly integrated to the Retainers, managing your workload will become much easier to do.
Retainers Are Integrated With All Other Relevant Functions
One of the differences between FreshBook invoicing system and other similar systems is that they are not solely dealing with the invoicing aspect of your business. But, they are also dealing with many other relevant aspects as well, such as time tracking, expense tracking, accounting, and so on.
As in the case of Retainers, this is a new feature that is integrated with all other relevant functions in your business. In this way, you can bill the clients on a recurring basis in advance and inform them about the progress of your work at the same time. As such, you are not required to use different software or apps since many functions are already integrated to ease your workflow. The time tracking function is the most valuable feature to use with Retainers, as it helps you log your work hours on the invoice itself, without the need for you to use any external time tracking software or apps.
The Retainer Summary Report Helps Review Your Work Performance
The Retainer Summary Report is another function that you can appreciate when using the FreshBooks platform in your business. When billing your clients in advance, your clients need to know how their alloted time is spent for their project. As such, the Retainer Summary Report can provide a detailed information regarding the hours used for their project as opposed to the hours available in the alloted time.
Since it is integrated to the Retainer invoice itself, you can give your clients the information that they need for their project. It is also useful for you to track the performance of your work throughout the time. You can find the information regarding the Clients, Period, and Groups of the Retainers that you have used. It is also very easy to organize your Retainers, making it easier for you to review it in the future.