Freshbooks is, to use their own words:
an online invoicing and time tracking service that saves you time and makes you look professional
To use my words,
Freshbooks is darned impressive!
With my recent departure from paid employment to working for myself, I needed to sort something out to do billing and I had heard of
Freshbooks so I gave it a go. Which is really easy to do as it's free to start off with.
Once you are in, you can customise the setup and start creating invoices etc. I in fact started off by doing an estimate for someone. It emails it to them and they can accept it online. Very cool, you get an email confirmation that they have approved it too.
Then, as you do work you can track your time spent. Which is pretty cool. Especially for iPhone users like me as they have a native application you can install on your iPhone that has a stop watch and lets you log time against projects.
From that time logged, or form the estimate you can create your invoices. The invoices are delivered by email AND by snail mail if you want. Which is really cool! Although being American they do send to the UK/internationally and the rate is reasonable and easy to understand.
I think this is so great! It just takes the hassle away from me. The moment I finish a job I create the invoice electronically and the invoice gets printed, stuffed in an envelope and sent by someone else. And it's pretty quick, couple of days to arrive, pretty much the same as if it was sent from the UK. Sure it's a bit more expensive (argueably), but there is ZERO hassle!
Once payment is received you can tell the system... or
Freshbooks also allows your clients to pay online via PayPal. Then it records the payment for you.
They provide reporting of aged debtors and that sort of thing too, so that is great.
It is still early days with Freshbooks, and I am sure their is competitors out there (actually I'd like to check them out if you like to recommend one). But to date I have been blown away by
Freshbooks. And in fact it's so great a client of mine actually commented on how cool
Freshbooks is.
When was the last time someone commented about how cool your billing software was??Anyway... I thoroughly recommend Freshbooks at this stage, and totally think they are worth a shot for your small business or "side project" billing.
Signing up is free and easy, all the features are available free, and you only start paying when you send invoices by snail mail or when you have enough clients to need to.
So go give them a try, you can sign up at
https://lancewicks.freshbooks.com/signup/ and get started. (and yes there is a referral system so if you sign-up via the links in this post I'd appreciate it. :-)
Lance.