Women 2.0 – Freshbooks

Posted by on Apr 2, 2008 in Blog, new media review | 1 comment

Martini Tuesday was last night at the ARC Lounge. It was a success and a great time was had by all. BTW the ARC lounge has great martinis!!!

The discussion was focused on software used by the different entrepreneurs for managing their invoicing and payments. The general consensus was that packages like simply accounting and quick books were not user friendly and had more of a focus on math. MYOB for mac was great however they no longer support Canada for the new versions.

Kristina Mausser, of Digital Word talked about her woes with the invoicing and payment world. She had problems with clients not paying and hated asking for payment. She had an excel spreadsheet that she used to keep track of the payments. She charged a retainer up front and the rest at the end of the project. Looking for a solution she went to the web and found various applications. The one that appealed to here was FreshBooks, from a company in Toronto. They are an online invoicing and time tracking service.

This is a great service and if you are just starting out you can use FreshBooks for free for 3 active clients per month. For $14 a month you can have 25 active clients!!! If your clients are not web savvy you can “buy stamps” and have the invoice mailed to the client. To test out thsi feature Kristina had a dummy invoice mailed to her and sure enough it worked. She received it in the mail.

FreshBooks have affiliations with other companies like paypal. Reminders are sent automatically by the system depending on the preference settings e.g. 30, 60 or 90 days. Time spent on projects can be tracked.

Some additional cool features

  • quarterly report’s sent out by the system
  • GST is calculated automatically
  • currency conversions
  • expense trackingdata can be imported into packages like Excel
  • customer support is great

So for all the entrepreneurs out there, if you are tired of keeping up with the receipts, project tracking and invoicing, check out FreshBooks.

Be Sociable, Share!

1 Comment

  1. Karen
    April 3, 2008

    That sounds like a very interesting application. I’ll definitely have to take a look at it.

Leave a Reply