FreshBooks Reviews: 4.5/5 — Highly Rated

Timekeeping to invoicing is fast and easy

Development team is not super responsive.

Efficient client billing

The appearance of the new Freshbooks is more appealing.

Invoice searching, $ credits, and time tracking are still inferior to the 'Classic' Freshbooks. It takes me longer to find and change what I want. The newer features offered I do not actually use. Over a year later, I still regret switching from Classic.

I'm still issuing invoices quickly and getting reporting.

That it is streamlined and when it works it works really well. The proposal to invoice workflow is amazing.

The help is really bad, its like they go out of their way to make it difficult to get help or a resolution. If you are logged in and click the help icon in the lower right, you only get precanned knowledge base articles that 99% of the time are useless. If you type chat, email, phone, anything other than a knowledge base component you get nothing. If you want the phone number you have to log out and go back to the home page of the site, and email you have to get out and go tot the contact us page, and there is NO chat component. Who calls anymore? Also the packages pricing model is based on the number of clients you have, and archived clients count towards that total. Even a prospect that you are writing a proposal for counts towards your total clients/customers. So if you write 30 proposals a year and have 25 clients you are now forced to delete a proposal every time you write one or pay for a higher plan just so you can submit more proposals to land more work. ITS A RIDICULOUS Pricing model, that makes no sense.

I'm making it easier to run the administrative part of my company with one just one person. Which is great. Everything is right at my fingertips and its fairly easy to manage and bill for time spent on a clients project.

When I first started using Freshbooks Classic over 5 years ago, everything was great including the base features, the Android mobile app, Invoice emailing, remembered items and services and the standard reports.

But now that I have switched to "new" Freshbooks about 2 years ago to maintain my automatic bank expense importing, the quality of almost all aspects have deteriorated in their usefulness. The mobile app always crashes in creating invoices or adding payments. The mobile app is very slow to synchronize current invoices and does not display the same list of invoices as the web page. The "New" interface is all show and little substance; big blocks of screen space are used for the 5 most current invoices or clients and you are forced to scroll past them to your sortable list of invoices or clients. Support for paid customers is basic and real help requires a call-back usually on the next business day.

I have given up solving any of my outstanding issues and I am actively looking for a suitable replacement to Freshbooks.

Automation, when it works properly. To have your invoices paid monthly or annually. The interface is pleasant. I haven't had a chance to try many of their other services, expenses, time tracking, projects or team. Haven't added any add-ons either. I like storing client contact info for quick use. It's great to see all of the running totals. Clients can add their photo to their profile, so you can see who you are communicating with. Reminder emails. Dashboard shows a lot of your financial insights. Shows how much outstanding your clients owe you. Definitely beats hand typing or writing invoices like I did in the past. I would procrastinate sending an invoice for the money I was owed. It was so much wasted work, that FreshBooks solved.I just wish they didn't drop the ball when they upgraded the system. Caused me to lose some clients. Wasn't good at all.

When upgrading to their new system, tons of issues. They had me downgrade to the old system again, new issues. Invoices weren't being sent out. Credit Card payments turned off on some recurring invoices. Paying way too much for a service that fails. I definitely found the original FreshBooks to be much easier to use. It seems they took lot of the simplicity away. Jumping ship and going to Tispr.com. They are only $2 per month for invoicing, $2 per month for contracts and $2 per month for a time tracker (which I don't use, so I don't subscribe). They also offer unlimited drive storage for $1 & tasks for $2. Pick and choose what I'd need. Even if I picked them all, it's $9 for Tispr and $50 for FreshBooks. Easy choice. After upgrading to the newer FreshBooks, I had clients who I gave 20% discount to, ended up with the discount twice on their invoice. The first client immediately thanked me for being so kind. How do you ask the client for the other 20% back after that!? Impossible! There were a few who underpaid due to this major FreshBooks screwup! Some were charities that I already give special discounts to. It was a very difficult time. On Tispr, you can chat directly with your clients, something missing in FreshBooks.

Automated recurring invoices, when it worked. One-off invoices. Keeping a list of frequently sold services. Having all of you client contact info in the same place their invoices are. Having all of my accounting in the same place as my invoicing is a huge help. Just noticed you can now import a CSV file of you clients, that would have helped years ago. If they had the projects feature years ago, that would have been helpful when I was touring the world as a tour manager for Twisted Sister.

Allowed customizable colors to match your branding

Their pricing structure is disingenuous. I was attracted to their pricing so I cancelled my account with my other Saas vendor. I spent hours recreating invoices from Quickbooks to later find out that the Freshbooks name is on the emails that go out to my clients. When I went to the Freshbooks website to find out what price plan removes their branding, no price was given for the "Select Plan"; You could only fill out a form to set up a phone call. Who has time for sales calls anymore?? That's why we go online! Come to find out over the phone that their "Select" pricing plan ranges from $100-$300, which is costlier than the Saas software I was trying to replace when I found them. I don't work my tail off to promote the Saas software I use to do my billing. It's not like they're doing that billing work for me. I'm doing all the billing work AND I have to pay $100-$300/month to not give them free promoting? I found their lack of candor about the pricing to be very disingenuous and just cannot recommend them.

None. In the end, they created more problems than they solved. I had already alerted my clients that I was switching Saas software so they didn't think these new invoices were spam. Now I have to walk all that back b/c I refuse to promote their company on the coattails of my hard work and I also refuse to pay $100-$300/month to remove their branding. They put me in a very embarrassing position as a small business owner. They even tried to tell me, "Well, we don't specify a price for that plan b/c it ranges depending on customization". Well, my business is web design, so I know it literally takes 10 seconds to put $100-$300 in that last field, which would've been more honest, helped clear up a lot of confusion, save a lot of my time, save a wasted phone call, save the time it'll take me to recreate my Quickbooks account and all the recurring invoices I deleted, and save the embarrassment I'll face next week trying to explain to my clients my change of course again AFTER I spend my weekend setting everything back up.

Freshbooks is designed pretty simple, which is nice, but its not a great program and consistently has issues.

Logging in to Freshbooks is a constant issue. When going to the log in page it frequently glitches and logs into the wrong venue or it says you have to go to a different log in page. Its maddening.

Freshbooks is our invoicing system that solves our need to collect payment from 3rd parties when guests are making a purchase.

Very easy to use interface. Time tracking seamlessly integrates with billing.

After being with Freshbooks for about a year, I may have to find another solution. Going back at least six months ago, I experienced a bug that is causing an error when I try to review previously tracked time entries (which is critical to my billing process). I tried all the basic troubleshooting things like switching networks, devices, browsers, clearing my cache etc. No dice. Opened a ticket with support who claimed it was probably a local network error. I disproved that by duplicating the issue on 2 other networks. After months, they finally acknowledged that the bug was real and existed only for my account (can that be?). Over a month into them acknowledging the bug and still no solution. Also, wish there was an integration with Clickup time tracking to avoid manually updating billing hours accrued by employees who don't track directly in Freshbooks.

Time tracking and billing. When the system worked smoothly, I saved time by streamlining billing.

I like the fact that it is really easy to create invoices from scratch for beginners. The classic freshbooks platform is aesthetically pleasing as well.

Something that came into my mind immediately was their support staff. Although they try to sell to their customer that their support staff is awesome, I personally did not have that experience with them. Our account manager at freshbooks scheduled two different meetings with me and completely missed them. Our bill had went up by $20 without any notice. When I contacted the support about this, it took almost half a year before they had correctly fixed our monthly bill. I literally had to contact their support staff every month to get the additional $20 waived. There is no integration with accounting softwares on their classic platform as well.

We were originally still on Quickbooks 2013 which was why we started using Freshbooks. But to be honest, we are moving off of Freshbooks this month as we saw added benefits from using Quickbook invoicing.

I prefer the old version. FreshBooks was "upgraded" in November 2020, with not any improvements that I found useful.

1, When you look at the invoice listing, the Customer Name is big and bold, and the invoice number is in very small light grey type, which is very hard on the eyes. I addressed this with FreshBooks last November, and they acknowledged that it was an accessibility issue, and they would put it at the top of their To Do list, and when I asked about it again in March, they said it would take 6 to 9 months to fix this, and still nothing. 2. The old FreshBooks had the ability to list every open invoice. The new FreshBooks offers a 150-item page. For my industry this is very problematic, as we have between 100 and 600 open invoices at a time, which means switching pages. And results in lower productivity. 3. They have stopped answering my emails. There apparently is no need to answer if the plan is to not actually do anything about it. For me, the new FreshBooks is a big bust. ADDITIONALLY: I have since tried to reach out to them again, with still no replies, downgrading my review to a 1.

The only reason we use FreshBooks now is to generate invoices. All other accounting goes through QuickBooks.

When I first started using Freshbooks, the support was great! --not anymore. One of the reasons that I chose Freshbooks was because it seemed to have one of the best proposal writing features. Even better than Quickbooks! It still doesn't give me everything I want, but it works for now. Hopefully, they will improve it in time. My main wish list item is the ability to create my proposal using Word and map Freshbooks fields to it.

The support has become impossible to non-existent! When I started using this software a year ago, I could open a chat window and get quick answers to my questions. Now, my only option is to send an email. Weeks later, I haven't received a response to some of them, and 100% of the time, they respond with a question that puts me back in the queue. I've been working on what should be a handful of straightforward issues for several months now! When they email me back, they don't include the question, and it takes them so long to respond that I forget what I asked, so I have to reply with "what was the question?" ...sending me back in the queue...WTF?? To add insult to injury, I had issues opening their help request window in Chrome, so I tried MS Edge. That was working until today. Now I have no way to get support!!

They aren't solving problems for me at this point.

I liked the dashboard and ease of creating invoices and tracking time for invoicing.

I mistakenly put in the wrong name on a credit card entry payment and the system initially accepted it then denied it. They placed a one-week hold so I could not re-submit and receive payment on a large invoice. It was so frustrating that Freshbooks doesn't have better business practices concerning this since small businesses are their primary audience.

tracking invoices and time

They have always had excellent support that is available via a phone call answered by a human. T

I've been a FreshBooks customer since 2008. It was very helpful in launching my consulting business. In 2016 I, along with other "classic" FreshBooks subscribers, received a letter from founder Mike McDerment introducing their new platform. Notably, the email promised the following: "Your current monthly service charge will be the same on the new product. Over time as we build more capabilities, you may choose to pay more to use some of those new capabilities based on the value they bring. That will be your decision at that time. We are excited to do more for you, more that we hope you will gladly choose to pay for." and "We believe in time, everyone will prefer to run their business on the new product, but we recognize that change is hard, and you will need to change on your timeline, not ours." In 2018 I was contacted by FreshBooks that my fees to continue using their software would be increasing by about 100%. This was not for the new version, this was to keep using the same exact product I already had. That's right, all the same features, now twice as expensive. Given the work it would take to move to another system, I decided it was worth it to just bite the bullet and accept the fee increase. This year I was informed that I would be forced to move to the new version of their software, and that my fees would be increasing, yet again, by another 25% . I expected this would happen at some point. You can't stop progress, right? As part of the transition I was told I must sever the relationship with my existing credit card processing company, Heartland, and be forced to use WePay, a Chase company, to process all of my payment. I am not a huge fan of Chase as a corporation and really didn't appreciate being forced into a relationship with them. I've had a great working partnership with Heartland and my local sales rep Jeff for over 5 years. So now onto my review of the NEW version of FreshBooks. If you are reading other reviews you may want to figure out if their review was for FB Classic or the New Freshbooks Meh. The Layout/UX is not as efficient as the classic version of FreshBooks. I used to be able to see a lot more content at once, but now there's at least 50% more whitespace. I'm sure it would get top marks in a college UX design class, but I'm not hanging this software on my wall to admire for its aesthetics. I want to see as much useful, relevant data as I can. I want that data to be easily sortable and filterable in ways that make sense. I want to be able to copy and paste things directly from the UI into an email when I need to while keeping the tables intact. I used to have those things in Classic Freshbooks, but no longer. On the flip side I now routinely scroll past the overabundance of white space, unasked for charts and graphs, forced tutorials and totally unhelpful quotes from philosophers while I'm trying to get work done. The previous version was designed by a freelancer who actually had to create a solution to his own problems. This new version feels like a very academic "looks good on paper" approach to solving real-world business problems by people who have no idea what the people who are using their software need to do on a daily basis. I am unimpressed. I should mention that I also use QuickBooks Online for my accounting, since FreshBooks has never really been a full-service accounting software or at least one that any of my accountants or bookkeepers wanted to deal with. I kept FreshBooks because it handled invoicing in a very efficient way that saved me a ton of time. Unfortunately, with this new version, that is no longer the case. The new version of FreshBooks is about as nimble and innovative as QBO so I have made the decision to transition away from FreshBooks and just use QuickBooks to handle my invoicing as well. I don't like the payment processing with WePay. I used to get the full amount of my transactions up front and then remitted the processing fees at the end of the month. This made it better for my cashflow and easier from an accounting perspective. WePay deducts their fees in advance so now I have to figure out the math at the end of the month and add a journal entry in order to properly account for my processing fees. This is additional work that I didn't have to do previously. I used to be very enthusiastic about this product and company, but my experiences in recent years show that they are changing and becoming a lot like the clueless, boring, corporate blobs to which they were once a "Fresh" alternative. (see what I did there?)

Invoicing, Time Tracking, Credit Card payments. The benefits in the former version was ease of use, efficiency, price (value) and simplicity. I believe the benefits I used to find have diminished in the new version of the software.

I wouldn't say I like anything about it.

Lake of respect of time, customer service

Terrible customer service and a lack of knowlege involving integrations with 3rd party websites, book keepers, CPA's while showing terrible tracking capabilities.

Not much, new version wiped out all the advantages

A lot: clunky interface, few reporting options, and if you want the system to send you an email when a payment is received, look elsewhere... FreshBooks doesn't!

Auto-billing, really simple needs, but that it cannot handle.

I liked the ease of use years ago when starting off. Had a clean and simple look to it

It has gotten more complicated to use, annual bill increased by more than 30% past 3 years now. I am getting no support or irrelevant answers to my concerns when I try to contact support despite paying for the plan with a "dedicated account manager. I am also getting charge extra for a second team member, my plan should have 2 included. I was offered lower transaction rates when my price increased last year but still paying the same 2.9% and can not get an answer from them. Freshbooks experiences a lot of interruptions in service and if customers try to pay or you are trying to invoice you have to wait until they go back online. They have been making changes that require re learning and re entering bank accounts, reconnecting stripe or paypal, re entering terms and conditions on contracts, too much to keep up with.

It was good for invoicing, now I am using cheaper methods and keeping more of my money.

It has a good online platform and easy to use app.

This program is VERY GLITCHY. The biggest problem is when you tell them that it's glitchy, they tell you that it's not and that they don't plan to fix it. The easiest example is when you try to send an invoice, there is no "account balance" on the invoice. So if one client has two invoices outstanding, they can never know how much they owe. Clients are always confused, and you have to manually send emails to tell them what their account balances are. By that point, they haven't paid anyway, since people don't like to do a bunch of work to figure out how much they owe you. This definitely DOES NOT automate your billing experience, as they claim it does, and instead, it requires significant manual calculations by hand to make sure account balances are correct. Another example is using the account statement feature. When you create an account statement for a client, using the default timeframe will yield a report with an “account balance” at the bottom, only that is not the real account balance. It is just a net of the most recent payments and invoices, but it DOES NOT add up to the account balance. As a result, my clients are always confused about what to pay, unless I manually go in, add up what they owe, and send them a custom written out note to explain what they should pay. I have contacted Freshbooks 26 times to discuss these issues, and they can’t even tell me if it will ever be fixed.

My clients are always confused about what they owe. That means serious delays in getting paid. Thus, I'm paying for this program so that my clients WILL NOT pay quickly.

time management and accounting all in the same package. Integration with credit card payment.

the system won't sum different categories such as hours and expenses. That still has to be done manually. The system is not designed for hard copy. Paper invoices are ok, but there's no way to print receipts with the invoice.

basic billing

I used to love everything about Freshbooks. Now, there's not much I really like about it. Customer service when I call in though is still #1.

There's so many bugs. My rate increased and with that cam problems. Clients names get stripped out once they're entered into the system. Which makes it difficult to search for clients if I don't remember their company nameWith proposals I cannot "Create from Last" without first opening up a recent proposal, going back, and then "Create from Recent". At that point I mind as well just duplicate things. Project management used to be the one thing I was holding onto. Now you can't sort by date and even worse, the only way to see who it's assigned to is to go into each project individually. Which is terrible for project management.

I will actually be leaving Freshbooks because it's caused problems rather than solving any.

I loved the ease of use of the product. I've been a customer for 6 years.

The recent UX change has placed value on "cute" over functional. Bugs and issues have plagued the new UX system and more clicks are now required to accomplish the same task from the previous system. One bug I reported duplicated expenses in the system. I reported it, it was validated as a bug - I was told not to eliminate the duplicate expenses - and I NEVER heard back when it was fixed, even though support told me they'd tell me when it was fixed. I spent 12 hours in January validating every single expense for the entire year. That's 12 hours I could have been using to service my clients or work on my own business. Unacceptable.

I was handling my accounting and I had started using it for electronic contracts and proposals.

Does it's job well, stays simple and unobtrusive. If you're the type of person who still uses Windows XP because "it's what you're used to" then this is the product for you because it will never ever change.

Next to no product development for the lifetime of the company. If you want a service that will never change - this is it. But if you're looking for one that will react to feedback, listen to the community and implement changes - this isn't what you're looking for. The only way to be less active than they have been with their product would to have be to shut down the company in recent years. Marketing is great, outbound communication looks busy, but the product has no improved or fixed really basic flaws for years.

It sends invoices well, and does it job. It requires a lot of things to be done manually above this (especially as most features touted as special like reminders are only setup on a global 'every client basis')