Online Invoicing with Freshbooks
I stumbled upon a great little online service for entrepreneurs and business owners who may be struggling with things like bookkeeping/invoicing. I’m no accountant, and I hate using things like Quickbooks. I end up having to pay an accountant as I should. But day-to-day invoicing is something I hope I can handle. I want to make it EASY for my customers to pay me and easy for me to keep track. So what is Freshbooks and how can it help you?
Freshbooks Overview
Freshbooks is an online invoicing service that allows you to handle a number of typical accounting tasks with ease and simplicity. I absolutely love it. It is not a replacement for full blown accounting software that is used by registered accountants, but it’s very handy to help you in your day-to-day billing/invoicing/payment gathering activities. It can integrate with your accounting software if needed.
From the Freshbooks website, here is a short list of features:
- Send & manage invoices online
- Look fortune 500 professional
- Track time online and on the go with mobile apps for the iPhone etc.
- Track expenses and re-bill your clients
- Track hours spent providing support and re-bill your client
- Customer portal
- Multi-currency support along with customizable sales tax information.
- 6 pricing options (including FREE option)
You’ll find great information available about how to use the service with video tours and excellent responsive customer support. I managed to get it setup in about 30 minutes or less and was ready to start sending invoices.
Online Invoicing
The basics of the service are – create an invoice and email your customer with a link to your Freshbooks portal. It will allow your customer to log in, view their balance, previous payments and even offer (if setup) the ability for them to pay their current balance with a credit card (through one of the many supported payment gateways, eg. PayPal is one of them). How is that for convenience to your customers and no more waiting for checks or hearing “it’s in the mail”. Make it easy for them to pay you!
What if your customer is not interested in online invoicing and wants a paper invoice? No problem. Freshbooks will mail your customer the printed invoice. You just need to purchase postal stamp credits from them and voila – done! No more printing invoices, getting stamps, dropping them in the mail box etc. That is all done for you by Freshbooks right from the web interface!
Expense Tracking
Do you regularly incur expenses that need to be re-billed to your customer? Freshbooks provides an easy to use interface to input expenses and enter the customer that the expense belongs to. At the time of invoicing, you can select to include the unbilled expenses and you’re set. It really is that easy, and the interface is very simple to use and understand.
Support Tracking
Do you provide any sort of paid support for your customers? You can easily keep track of the time you spent supporting your customers. You can then easily invoice your customers for your hours providing support all tracked through the Freshbooks interface.
Mobile Connectivity
There is a full application for the iPhone called Minibooks. It is for Freshbooks and allows you to do everything from your phone. You can literally send your customer an invoice on the spot! The application is not written by Freshbooks themselves, but I’ve played with it and it’s well worth the small Appstore price. Even the free version is very useful and capable.
Summary
I highly recommend this service for online invoicing. I’ve been using it now for a couple of months and love it. I wish I had found this many months ago – it would have saved me a lot of aggravation and time invoicing clients. Go sign-up for a free account now!
Disclaimer: I have used my affiliate link in this post, but I’m only writing this because I love this service and use it myself.
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Filed Under: Business
