Financial Memos writes: FreshBooks is one of many cloud accounting apps that have entered the
market over the past few years. While cloud accounting has not grown as
quickly as cloud solutions have in other industries, recent arrivals on
the market show that the trend is definitely upward. After Quickbooks
Online, FreshBooks is the most popular cloud-based accounting software
in North America with nearly 5 millions users.
When it comes to usability and based on online reviews, FreshBooks
has one of the cleanest interfaces. The navigation is right on the top
of the screen and I have to admit that the designers have done a
fantastic job. The frontpage shows the recent activity and includes
shortcuts that you can use to create invoices, record expenses, track
time spent on projects, export financial reports and much more.
But enough with the way that FreshBooks looks! If you are a small
business owner, an accountant that is serving a client or a bookkeeper,
it’s the functionality that you would be most interested in. So, what
can FreshBooks offer to you?
There are so many software solutions, both cloud-based and self
hosted, that can create invoice and track whether there are payments
that are due. However, that’s not what a complete accounting package
should be limited to.
Freshbooks is much more than just an invoicing solution. You can of
course invoice your customers, receive and record payments but you can
also perform other tasks such as expense tracking, reports generation,
tax calculation and much more.
You can connect FreshBooks with your bank or your credit card and
start tracking and recording your expenses automatically. That’s
something useful for the small business owners that do their own
bookkeeping and prefer to spend more time running their business than
record transactions all day long.
FreshBooks Time Tracking Feature Review
One of the most useful features that FreshBooks offers is the time
tracking. I think it’s a fantastic tool since it allows companies that
offer services for example to track how much time each member of a team
spends on a project and compare the cost incurred to the revenue that
the client generates. You can understand that this is very crucial since
accepting loss making jobs can not be part of a long term strategy.
Freshbooks also offers the opportunity to directly charge and invoice a
client based on the billable hours spent on a project. That is a
fantastic feature for accountants, designers, lawyers and many other
professionals that sell services and charge by the hour.
Financial Reports and Taxes
Another important feature that Freshbook offers is the ability to
generate reports that should included in the analysis of every small
business owner. You can run monthly income statement reports and track
sales and expenses, understand your margins and be able to see what
expenses you should be cutting.
Speaking of expenses, FreshBooks can also run an expenses report so
that you can save them in excel files, plot graphs or create pivot
tables to see how much you are spending and where.
Another report that you can generate is the aging report. The debtor
aging report can basically tell you how much your clients owe to you and
if there are amounts that are past their due date (and how long). You
should be keeping track of such things and you should never let your
sales turn into bad debt. The best thing to do is invoice fast and cash
in faster!
FreshBooks and Third Party Addons
In my opinion, what sets FreshBooks apart from other accounting
cloud-based software is the ability to integrate it with third party
professional software. The list of addons that are supported is endless
but briefly, you can integrate FreshBooks with CRM software such
HighRise or Batchbook, specialized time-tracking software such as
ChronoMate, marketing tools such as MailChip, workforce management
tools, project management software and the list goes on!
Finally, something that every business owner should be looking
(actually before looking into anything else) relates to data security. FreshBooks is a cloud-based software which means that you have no
control over the way that your data are stored on the FreshBooks
servers. The goods news is that you can export your data. In addition,
FreshBooks creates backups and stores them in different locations. They
use RackSpace (a big name in the hosting industry) with very big clients
such as GE and Cisco so that you can be sure that your data will be
safely stored.
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Really this is a great article about Cloud based software.
ReplyDelete