Freshbooks: What You Need to Know

Freshbooks: What You Need to Know

Freshbooks

FreshBooks is an application based on the Web and encrypted 256-bit accounting, billing time, estimating and billing, which aims to replace the desktop based accounting programs like QuickBooks, Quicken, FirstEdge. It is an aspiration that FreshBooks and responds almost reached.

Good business accounting softwares do a few things well: Track income and expenses, manage estimates, invoices and customer payments, and give you a clear year-end financial reports. Really large accounting applications also allow you to create and manage inventory and track the cost of goods sold. FreshBooks excels in almost all these areas, but only has 19 reports. Although this is much less than you find in most office accounting applications, FreshBooks offers reports that are sufficient for most companies. FreshBooks is also limited in terms of inventory management, providing basic inventory tracking that will only be useful for companies where the inventory is not a major source of income.

FreshBooks offers several levels of cost from free to $ 149 per month. Pay more increases the number of customers and employees that you can handle, and free accounts display a FreshBooks ad on every email, invoice and expenses that you send. Under the business finance app, FreshBooks offers most of the features found in similar business accounting apps like QuickBooks and AccountEdge and offers many more features than Ballpark.

FreshBooks working space is divided into ten tabs that you use to manage customers, employees, invoices, estimates and expenditure. FreshBooks also offers tools for time tracking and billing. You can access these time tracking tools using a Web browser, including mobile Safari. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you can use the minibooks for FreshBooks (iTunes link). Using Minibooks on your iPhone or iPod Touch allows you to create new customers, invoices and estimates. I much prefer Minibooks to FreshBooks on my phone, as FreshBooks Web interface didn't scale properly on the smaller iPhone screen.

FreshBooks uses a home page to display the status and current activity of all your open invoices and estimates, and includes information about the last time one of your customers connected to see an invoice or an estimate or to make a payment. Although FreshBooks displays the same information that Ballpark does, the home page FreshBooks is not as clear or organized as well as is the homepage of Ballpark.

It's easy to import customer data from your current accounting application or almost all address book applications, but the import of existing accounting information is currently not possible. When you create new estimates and invoices they are emailed to customers who can then approve the estimate, make the payment on the invoice or request that changes be made. FreshBooks is currently supporting 10 different payment methods, including PayPal and Authorize.net and your customers can make payment by clicking on a payment link that appears on the invoice. If you choose, or if your customers prefer, you can also send paper invoices by mail for a small fee.

(Image Caption: FreshBooks lets you interact with customers and update estimates and invoices entirely via the Internet.)

FreshBooks can track all of your business expenses and allows you to link individual expenses to specific clients when you need to pay for items you bought, but there is no way for you to add a markup for what you paid. FreshBooks allows your customers to create support tickets that you can follow and meet and you can create specific folders to the customer to store documents for your customers to review.

FreshBooks is a business accounting software based on high performance web that is suitable for many types of small business owners. Although Freshbooks reporting capabilities are very limited compared to desktop applications like QuickBooks or even FirstEdge very basic MYOB, it is FreshBooks offers should be more than enough for most users. But take note, if inventory management is a big part of your business, FreshBooks will not be able to fulfill your business accounting needs.

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