Ewakened loves Fresh Books
If you are like me, you are an entrepreneur and you have changed accounting system more times than you can count.
On second thought, hopefully you found Fresh Books at the beginning and didn't need to look any further. Its amazing that something so simple can make me so happy but it does. I have been using Fresh Books for a week and don't know how I lived without it.
Fresh Books isn't a full blown accounting system. It doesn't do bank reconcilations or anything like that. It's really designed for invoicing, expensing and billing. Since I have an account that files my Tax for my business, this is really all I need my software to do. If you need more accounting like features, it has a whole whack of plugins and plays nice with a bunch of different systems such as Xero.
So how did we get here?
In the past, I used two very good applications to manage my finances: Billings and Less Accounting.
Billings is beautiful. It's built for the Mac and it shows. The animations, graphics and user interface are stunning. It also has a really great iPhone application that does everything you want it to do. However, I found it really hard to sync across multiple machines. I used MobileMe and Dropbox with some success but found the syncing clumsy. Also, it was designed more for invoicing and billing rather than true accounting and expense tracking. This lead me to Less Accounting.
Less Accounting is also great. It's built using Rails which gave it huge points in my book and is really one of the main reasons why I checked it out. It is exactly what it claims to be, it's a simple accounting system. However, something about it didn't click with me. I wasn't a huge fan of the user interface and found the constant popups a little annoying. Less Time Spent, the time tracking component was awesome and I miss it at times, however, Fresh Books has that covered too. Also, the Auto-Syncing of Credit Cards and Bank Accounts was really bad. Very buggy. This could be because I am Canadian, but regardless I wasn't a fan. I really used it as an expense tracking application and sent a few invoices with it.
Then I rediscovered Fresh Books. When I started using it again it was magical. The interface is beautiful, it's fast, it has the most practical time tracking section of any billing software I've used and it has really flexible billing options. It also motivates you to get more business, it shows you week by week how much you are billing, and if want, shows you how you stack up to other clients in your business category. I enjoy logging in and tracking time. I enjoy making expenses. This is a good sign.
Fresh Books also has a great iPhone app called MiniBooks, with solid syncing and does everything you need a mobile app to do.
So if you need to bill, tack time, send invoices and keep track of expenses and you want to smile while doing it, start using Fresh Books.
Did we mention we love it.
Comments (0)
Posted
by Kent Fenwick
