My Freshbooks Experiment

The Experiment

Back in May of 2010, I decided to do an experiment. In June, I was going to do all of the bookkeeping for my business in Freshbooks. As a bookkeeper, my own books are ironically simple to maintain, so a full-fledged package like QuickBooks isn’t necessary for day to day record keeping.

I think the experiment was a lot of fun, and I have been using Freshbooks ever since.

The Verdict

At the time, when I wrote my final verdict, I wasn’t planning to stick with it. It was a nice experiment, and I thought it didn’t make a lot of sense given the cost and lack of features.

Since then, I’ve had a change of heart.

Most importantly, I’ve been able to reach out to their support team on a number of occasions. Simply put, having a team like that at your disposal is worth the monthly fee. I’ve tried to contact Intuit support before, and I have posted numerous times on their forums. I don’t think I have ever had any of my questions answered completely. If you think you’ll ever need help with your bookkeeping/invoicing app, then I highly recommend Freshbooks for that reason alone.

The other aspect that changed my mind was the fact that it’s online. Back in June, I was working much more heavily offline, and almost exclusively with local clients. I’m now working with more clients remotely than I am locally, so having the ability to quickly send out estimates and invoices, receive payments, and have access to reports online is very important.

But…

In my perfect world, I still need to find a full accounting package like QuickBooks that resides online. It would need to handle all of my clients work, so I’d need to be able to create multiple files, not just have to buy multiple accounts. Ideally, it would link up perfectly to Freshbooks, so the two could compliment each other.

In case you missed it the first time around, here are the posts from mid-2010. They are listed in chronological order, so the first link is the initial post.