How I Save Hundreds of Dollars a Month with Freshbooks

Zac Johnson writes: Freshbooks is an awesome online invoicing platform for freelance marketers, businesses and anyone in between. I’ve known about them for a few years now, but it wasn’t til earlier this year that I actually started using. I’ve already made hundreds of dollars (in savings) by using their service and in this post I’m going to show you how you can do the same.

Who needs Freshbooks?

If you accept payments online, need invoicing and want to create a directory of all your clients/advertisers, then Freshbook is likely a great solution for you. I’m not the best book keeper in the world, but Freshbooks makes this pretty easy for me.

Through ZacJohnson.com and my other sites I get a lot of advertising requests. I will usually follow up to these requests with an email and we will build an advertising package for each client. I used to tell the advertiser my Paypal email address and have them send payment that way. The problem with this is that I was giving Paypal a nice chunk of my money! (more on that later)

Now when I have a new advertiser or something I am getting payment from someone for, I simply head over to my Freshbooks account. Once logged in, all I need to do is enter in their Name and Email along with the invoice details. I then click a button and the invoice is automatically sent to the advertiser and requests their payment.

How Freshbooks is Saving Me Money Over PayPal

The real value in any service really comes down to how much time or money it can save you. Since Freshbooks is already saving me a bunch of time, I will tell you about how it saves me money by issuing invoices through their system, yet still using Paypal to accept payments.

As a Paypal Standard user, when you accept payments you are getting charged 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. That means if someone sends you $1,000, Paypal is taking a $29 + .30 cut. That can add up to a lot of money!

When you use Freshbook invoicing, you have the option to check off “PayPal Business Payments”, which charges you only .50 for the transaction… no matter how much money you are requesting. The only bad news about this is that the person sending the payment can’t use a credit card… but still, only using this method half of the time will still save you a ton of money!

What does Freshbooks Cost?

If you accept more than $1,000 a month in payments from advertisers, Freshbooks is a no brainer. The monthly membership cost of Freshbooks starts at only $19.95 and allows you to manage 25 different clients. If you are doing quick invoices and don’t expect clients to come back again, you can simply remove them from your account and add new ones. This is what I have been doing and the $19.95 a month plan has been working perfectly for me.

There are plenty of other benefits and feature of Freshbooks that I’m not even using, but I recommend you take a tour through their site and check it out for yourself.