Freshbooks in 2017 - My #1 Pick for Small Business Accounting

In November of 2006, early in the days of my blogging adventures, I wrote a post about FreshBooks. I had just discovered the site and was so excited. Our family's company invoiced around 300 customers monthly. The process of reconciling accounts aging, printing, stuffing, and mailing invoices was extremely time-consuming.

At that time SaaS was in its infancy, particularly at the individual or small business level. Quickbooks had the vast majority of the small business accounting market. The idea of storing your small business data in the cloud scared most people. If you were a small business and handling your own accounting or even a CPA doing the accounting for others, Quickbooks or Peachtree were the only choices. They came in boxes with a disk or CD, which you manually installed on the computer. There was no app store to download directly onto your computer.

Along came Freshbooks, with a novel idea. They would allow you to do your accounting online, track your time, your expenses, and bill your customers. Imagine the possibilities! Being able to access your business financials from anywhere you had an internet browser! Not only that, FreshBooks would also mail your invoices directly to customers along with a return envelope, all for a little over the cost of a stamp. It was an amazing concept and I was on board immediately.

I couldn't convince my father and we ended up not using FreshBooks for that business. However, when I opened my own business less than two years later, I knew FreshBooks was the way to go. The time savings and ability to access data from anywhere was invaluable. Instead of accounting data being stuck on a computer in the office, it was everywhere we went. I'm now on my third business using FreshBooks since 2006 and I'm still a super fan.

As Freshbooks has developed and refined both their site and their mobile applications, the advantages of using their platform have grown. Now we can easily invoice, record payments and expenses, track time, and even accept credit cards. The ability to have an invoice sent via snail mail remains in place, which is an excellent option for customers who prefer paper invoices mailed to them.

I also use Freshbooks to easily track my business expenses and get rid of those pesky paper receipts. I make it a habit of taking a quick picture and entering my expenses as I incur them. This saves me the time and trouble of having to spend hours at a time going back through my month with a stack of receipts. Using the Freshbooks iPhone app, I frequently invoice people on the go, to make sure bringing in revenue occurs as quickly as possible.

After over a decade of using FreshBooks, I am always impressed by their customer service. Any interactions I have are with extremely knowledgeable and friendly employees who's goal is to help me. I've never once had a bad experience. For ease of use, simple pricing, and their relationships with customer, I give them a 10/10!

If you'd like to give them a try, hop on over to their site and take a tour!