FreshBooks Reviews & Product Details

It has a timer built in that you can start/stop, and bill from time entries logged.

I wish there was a way to send automatic statements to past due accounts.

Great, simple solution for time tracking & billing.

I liked that at the time Freshbooks was a decent solution to send invoices to my design clients. Later features to add deposits (via percentages) and expenses were a nice add-on. There's even a plan (not on site, contact them) where you can get a small plan, where to start you can have up to two clients at a time to try out.

The fact that there is a newer version, but I wasn't included in the upgrade or asked to upgrade to check out new features. Also, as a Designer I am in need of more such as a portal where clients can login, online contracts, upload my logo vs showing Freshbooks logo. I want my clients to have a great experience working with me and a way to balance my needs. Freshbooks just handles invoices, where as I need more. I don't need a bunch of apps to get things done.

Invoicing and payments.

Simple invoicing, expense tracking. Prior to using Freshbooks we were using excel sheets and Expensify. It took hours to gather all our information to give our accountant and it was messy. Freshbooks has centralized this process and allowed my partner and I to collaborate much more efficiently.

limited functionality for our specific business. We're an online marketing company with a specific focus on towing. There are certain functions we would need specifically for our industry that we still have to track separately that would be nice to have built int.

less accounting fess, better collaboration, cost savings for time.

Update: When Freshbooks Classic was sunset, mine was one of the accounts that were broken during the changeover. This caused considerable issues and a significant amount of time on my part. Unfortunately, that change was accompanied by a dip in the level of service provided. Post-Classic, nothing works as well as it had prior to the change-over. Eventually, I will make a change to another software provider. They just aren't the same Freshbooks. While I don't currently want to invest the time and energy into switching to another solution, I am no longer willing to suggest them to others based on how they handled turning off Classic. ____________________________________ Original: Freshbooks makes time tracking and invoicing very easy. Their customer service is outstanding, they always pick up in just a few rings and their reps are top-notch. My accountant has easy access to all of my records as well.

I wish I could easily have all my accounting done right in Freshbooks, but it doesn't meet all of our requirements. Right now we swivel chair between Freshbooks and Quickbooks.

Update: Right now, Freshbooks is in place because I don't have the time to switch. Eventually I will be looking for a company that is more like Freshbooks used to be. __________________ Original: I needed to reduce the amount of time I was spending on time tracking and invoicing. It is incredibly easy with Freshbooks.

This saas has recurring invoices, and it has direct payments with several gateways available, including Paypal, Stripe, and their own provided by Ways (I think).

Their so-called improved system has eliminated a few key features. The main one was the email iteration; a message is emailed no matter how an invoice is paid by either the customer or through our manual input. It has become somewhat cumbersome to track paid invoices especially if we enter them manually.

Our invoices are compiled using FreshBooks and are paid via FreshBooks. All in all, it does its job, but when you are accustomed to certain features, and then they are removed, it makes it difficult not to want to switch.

Freshbooks enables me to keep current on my customers status. Also, it allows them to see their payment status. It's clearly set-up and straightforward to use.

Too expensive. Could have simplified setup.

Keeping Current

It is easy to use and quick to send an invoice.

It does not have a ton of accounting features.

I am able to send invoices on the fly and that helps me keep focused on service.

I enjoy the responsive and helpful customer service. I have rarely encountered a customer service rep that wasn't help and willing to do whatever it took to ensure I was satisfied with the service and software. They took the time to explain and research the different topics that I called about. There was also rarely ever a wait time when I called. The price point fits the budget of our small business. The reports generated are easy to read and easy to generate. I have a wide variety of different template reports that I can choose from in order to provide me with the data that I am looking for. I enjoy the automation of the invoicing and billing especially in an industry where we have multiple recurring services that need to be billed on a monthly basis. I like the flexibility I have to create different recurring invoices whether it be weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly or custom.

Transitioning from classic to the new version was hard. It was less intuitive and had less functionality than its predecessor. I can't properly filter transactions, Taking payments over the phone is now a service that costs me money, and the system as a whole seems less user-friendly. The bank integrations would often fail which made it so I lost a number of expense transactions that I then had to input manually.

P&L Reports, Automatic invoicing, Online payments, Accounting reports, tracking expenses, budget allocation, revenue projections, previous year numbers, Auto integration with various credit cards to avoid manual input of data, Import expenses, Hourly consulting tracking and billing, Cash flow statements. I would also like to see a recurring ACH option for invoices I send to clients to save money on the CC processing fee.

Easy to use. Great customer service. Good apps

Limited users. A bit on the expensive side

Great solution for small businesses

I like that it's inexpensive, easy-to-use (for me and clients) and well organized.

I've used freshbooks for years and never had an issue until I upgraded. With the new version, you don't have a free option and you lose the ability to accept PayPal. I'l be canceling next month.

Accounting software with integrations

I work at a small business, where we don't have an accounting department -- it's just an additional line on the CEO's already long job description. FreshBooks helps us invoice quickly and efficiently without hiring another person -- or spending a lot of time. It also allows our team to track time. This helps us monitor the hours we’re spending on each client work, as well as internal projects.

We wish there was a way to program in a recurring task, so we didn't have to manually enter some of the things we do every day during time entry.

In a service-focused business, time is money. We need to know how much time it takes to complete the work we're assigning to our team, and Freshbooks helps us track that and identify areas where we need to become more efficient. When it comes time for reviews, we use the FreshBooks log to figure out if an employee is overwhelmed by client demands or needs more training.

Invoicing was fairly easy but you cannot access your files once you no longer have a membership. So for us that was not good.

That once you switch programs you can no longer access your past files. For us being a service industry business, that was a deal-breaker.

We were able to invoice fairly easily but compared to what we use now there are not that many benefits.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.