FreshBooks Review: Features, Pricing, & Alternatives

FreshBooks is cloud-based invoicing software that caters to industries such as Information Technology (IT), legal services, business consultancy, and marketing.

This software automates invoicing and billing. Its web-based design has numerous possibilities for automating invoicing and allows for paying using online payment choices.

In this review, we will look at the benefits and drawbacks, the cost, and features of FreshBooks to help you decide if it is the best fit for your business.

SMB Guide’s Verdict for FreshBooks

SMB Guide’s overall rating for FreshBooks is 8.5 out of 10.

Here’s the detailed breakdown of the scoring for each factor:

Factor	Rating (out of 10)
Pricing & Plans	8
Feature Set & Customization Options	8.5
Automated Invoicing	8
Expense Tracking	8.5
Multi-currency Support	8.5
User Interface and User Experience	8.5
Integrations and Compatibility	8
Customer Support	9
SMB Guide Rating	8.5

In this review of FreshBooks, I’ve followed SMB Guide’s detailed criteria for evaluating invoicing software.

FreshBooks is a fantastic choice for service-based companies seeking reliable invoicing and billing. It offers excellent project management and customer service that makes it a greater option worth considering for your business.

This platform is a great choice for businesses looking to quickly set up invoicing and an accounting system. However, the software lacks features like income tracking and inventory management and isn’t sophisticated enough to meet the demands of major enterprises and product-based businesses.

Therefore, it is more suitable for small and medium enterprises than for larger companies.

Pricing & Plans

FreshBooks has four different plans for businesses of all kinds. You can choose from the Lite, Plus, Premium, and Select plans, depending on your business requirements.

While the platform does not offer a free plan, it allows users to test out the whole feature set for free for thirty days without entering any payment information.

All plans are single-user plans by default. Although accountants are added for free, additional team members such as administrators, managers, employees, and contractors can be added at additional costs.

Going for an annual subscription might be a better option as FreshBooks annual subscription will save you 10% over a monthly payment schedule.

Let’s examine the various FreshBooks plans and their associated prices and features.

The Lite plan is the starter plan for businesses that are just starting and have fewer than five current clients. This plan allows you to track hours, receive online invoice payments, and link the software to your bank account and it is particularly excellent for managing your spending as your company grows.

You can also easily upgrade to the next plan as your company expands. The Plus plan has several benefits over the Lite plan, especially for expanding businesses.

It allows users to bill up to 50 clients and enables them to send proposals, recurring invoices, automatic payment reminders, and late fees.

All of the features of the Plus plan are included in the Premium plan and you can bill up to 500 clients. This plan is perfect if you have over a hundred clients and are searching for a simple way to handle and bill them while keeping your paperwork organized.

The Select package is the ideal choice if you have more than 500 active clients. This plan is available at customized pricing depending on user requirements and includes a dedicated account manager to work with users.

The software also offers three add-ons:

• Advanced Payments at $20 per month to save and charge customer credit cards.
• Additional Team Members at $10/person/month to Increase the number of members if the current number is insufficient.
• Gusto Payroll for payroll services to help you manage spending.

Lite

This is the basic plan that offers all the essential features to get a business started with invoicing.

Price

• $7.60 per month
• $159.60 per year

Features

• Unlimited invoices to up to 5 clients
• Tracking of unlimited expenses
• Sending unlimited estimates
• Get paid with credit cards and bank transfers (ACH)
• Run reports for easy analysis

Who it’s for: Freelancers, new businesses with less than 5 active clients

Plus

The Plus plan offers more clients than the basic plan and additional features including automatic payment reminders, recurring invoices, and more.

Price

• $13.20 per month
• $277.20 per year

Features

• Unlimited invoices to up to 50 clients
• Recurring invoices and client retainers
• Unlimited estimates and proposals
• Get paid with credit cards and bank transfers (ACH)
• Capture receipt data automatically
• Invite accountant
• Financial and accounting reports

Who it’s for: Small businesses, freelancers with more than 5 active clients

Premium

This is an advanced plan that allows you to manage an unlimited number of clients and offers many other advanced features.

Price

• $24 per month
• $504 per year

Features

• Unlimited invoices to an unlimited number of clients
• Set up recurring invoices and client retainers
• Send unlimited estimates and proposals
• Get paid with credit cards and bank transfers (ACH)
• Capture bills and receipt data automatically
• Invite accountant
• Track project profitability
• Customize email templates with dynamic fields

Who it’s for: Businesses and organizations with a growing clientele

Select

This plan is best suited for larger organizations with a huge number of active clients and specific custom requirements.

Price

• Custom pricing

Features

• 2 team member accounts included
• Simple data migration with Easy Switch
• Unlimited invoices to an unlimited number of clients
• Recurring invoices and client retainers
• Unlimited estimates and proposals
• Lower credit card transaction fees and capped bank transfer (ACH) fees
• Automatically capture bills and receipt data
• Invite accountant
• Remove FreshBooks branding from client emails
• Dedicated exclusive Select support

Who it’s for: Larger organizations with 500+ clients

Feature Set & Customization Options

Regardless of the pricing plan you choose, FreshBooks offers an amazing feature set. With features like limitless and personalized invoices, online payment acceptance, and ACG bank transfers, even the basic plan offers great value.

Users can choose from a variety of editable designs, automate digital invoices, quickly apply discounts, and receive real-time notifications when invoices are seen or paid for online.

You can customize FreshBooks invoices to reflect your company’s branding, and they’re simple to produce and send. Your clients can pay you straight from the invoice as well.

The header, colors, typeface, and logo are all customizable and you can also add phrases and notes to the invoices. Features such as reminders, recurring invoicing, and late fines are available with the Plus and Premium subscriptions.

The Accounts receivables help users understand how much money is owed by the client. You can email and print these invoices and set up recurring invoices. These invoices can be customized by adding the company logo, including personal messages, and adding expenses and inventory. 

You can also send gentle reminders to your customers by reviewing the sorted list of accounts receivable.

Features for managing bills and vendors are included in Account Payable. These are only accessible in the Premium and Select subscriptions. The platform allows users to manually enter transactions by uploading a photo of the bill and then assigning them to a bank account.

However, you need to first authorize FreshBooks access to your bank account for this.

Automated Invoicing

Automated invoice processing with FreshBooks enables users to reduce the amount of time for processing invoices by employing artificial intelligence for the process.

This tool lets you handle invoices more quickly and helps improve the precision of your company’s billing procedure. It works particularly well for sending and receiving recurring bills automatically.

FreshBooks offers features to automate recurring invoices and billing cycles in the higher subscriptions. If you bill a customer frequently, you can set up recurring invoices for the same, saving you time and resources.

FreshBooks also allows you to send reminders for invoices after certain intervals of time.

Expense Tracking

Keeping track of company expenses through the retention of invoices, receipts, and other payment documentation helps improve the financial performance of your budget. FreshBooks offers an expense tracking feature to help you manage your cash flow.

With FreshBooks’ expense tracking features, you can effortlessly manage your company’s daily, weekly, and monthly spending.

This software offers a simple, easy-to-use expense tracking feature. You can log any receipts as expenses by simply taking a picture of the receipt and linking it to an item.

You can then connect them to credit card or bank account activities and add them to bills by classifying them as billable. You can even use them to manage your budget by attaching them to projects or clients.

The software also allows you to add an expense to an invoice to fulfill a client’s refund request. Additionally, you can import expenses straight from your bank by linking the Expense Tool to your credit card or bank account.

Multi-Currency Support

It is simple to manage clients in different countries with FreshBooks’ multi-currency support. The platform can easily convert to a number of currencies.

FreshBooks supports nearly 14 languages and 170 currencies. This makes the platform great for global business and invoicing.

Some of the currencies and languages supported by FreshBooks include:

• English
• Spanish
• French
• German
• Danish
• Dutch
• Estonian
• Greek
• Italian
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Swedish
• Norwegian

The platform allows you to select your preferred language and currency for every invoice. The chosen currency for a client remains the default for all future transactions for invoices with that client.

The multi-currency support can also help you if your expenses are in different currencies and you can easily select the currency in which each expense is done.

With multi-currency accounting, the platform displays a dashboard for each currency with which you conduct business. You can quickly switch between them, and get access to the full picture anytime you need it.

User Interface and User Experience

FreshBooks offers a straightforward user interface with an easy-to-navigate layout. This platform is designed to be used effectively even by beginners at business invoicing and accounting.

Getting started with FreshBooks is quite simple. You can create an account or directly sign in with your Google or Apple account.

To help business owners get a feel for the platform, FreshBooks offers a 30-day free trial. This can help you decide whether using FreshBooks accounting is appropriate for your business.

You can choose from one of four primary FreshBooks plans, depending on the size and complexity of your company, as soon as a free trial expires.

After logging in to your account for the first time, the software guides you through the features on every page to help you understand how to use it effectively.

The main dashboard allows you to track invoices, income sources, profits and losses, and spending. You can additionally set up FreshBooks for Android or iOS and get access to the system.

The software also has a support page for setting up video webinars. The support team conducts webinars on a regular basis to explain the fundamentals of using the software and its capabilities.

Integrations and Compatibility

FreshBooks offers over 100 integrations to meet the requirements of all types of businesses. Some of the major integrations offered by FreshBooks include:

• G Suite
• Zoom
• HubSpot
• Dropbox
• Slack
• Fundbox
• Shopify
• Stripe
• PayPal 
• Squarespace 
• Mailchimp

You can easily integrate with online payments and Payroll tools for effortless invoicing and accounting.

FreshBooks works perfectly on desktops and also offers mobile applications for iOS and Android for invoicing on the go.

The mobile apps are professional, stylish, and quick to use and include essential tools and data businesses need to work on accounting. They include a dashboard and access to FreshBooks’ automatic mileage tracker, which lets you use your phone to record distance as you drive.

You can generate and view invoices, estimates, and expenses, and record hourly billable activities outside the office.

Customer Support

Reliable customer service is an important feature to consider when selecting and invoicing software.

If you encounter any problems with the program, you can contact customer service at any time of day or night. You can contact the FreshBooks support team via phone, live chat, or email.

You can also go through its extensive self-help center, which includes how-to articles and solutions to the most common questions.

The platform additionally includes a support page for setting up video webinars and the FreshBooks support team conducts webinars regularly to teach the fundamentals of the platform.

FreshBooks accounting software provides three types of webinars.

• Learn how to set up your FreshBooks account
• Maximize FreshBooks Account Usage
• Review sales tax summary, profit and loss, invoice details, and expense reports

Live chat may also be available during a webinar’s 30 to 60 minute duration.

FreshBooks — Unique Features

Here are some of the features that personally made FreshBooks stand out to me.

Time and mileage tracking

Calculating the total time required to complete a project can be difficult for many businesses. You can avoid this problem by linking your payments with FreshBooks. All FreshBooks plans include mileage and time tracking tools.

The accounting program includes a useful time-tracking tool that helps you monitor and track the time and money spent on a project.

The invoicing features of this software allow you to customize your time tracking to an hourly or flat price based on the project’s requirements. The time-tracking tool enables your team members to log their time independently for each project, allowing you to track individual and total time progress and quickly determine your clients’ costs.

Context-sensitive settings

The ability of FreshBooks to show links to context-sensitive settings when you create invoices is a feature that sets it apart from its competitors.

Context-sensitive settings appear when you save an invoice. This feature also lets you reopen and amend previously saved invoices. 

These settings can help you switch between different invoicing styles, setting recurring invoices and online payments. This feature helps save time and also reminds users of their available choices.

What the Experts Say About FreshBooks

FreshBooks has a 4.5 rating on G2 with 731 reviews and a 4.5 rating on Capterra with 4,399 reviews. It is praised for its ease of use and is highly rated by small businesses.

My overall experience with fresh books is excellent I’ve never had any issue with the system it works perfectly fine customer service responds right away if you do have any issues I remember I missed a payment and they gave me a call to remind me and even gave me enough time to pay it without canceling my account or not allow me access.

Stephen S., CEO – Verified Capterra

We struggled to find a solution that would allow us to easily track the time for multiple employees and make billing as simple as a couple of clicks. Most everything we used or tried required multiple systems that either didn’t integrate at all or didn’t integrate well, and required a lot of time to prep invoices and collect payments. Frehsbooks eliminated all of those issues and paid for itself in the first month.

Chris E., Director of Operations – Verified Capterra

FreshBooks Alternatives

FreshBooks offers a comprehensive set of invoice creation options at reasonable prices. However, it may not be the greatest option for all organizations because each type has unique requirements.

If you have more specific requirements, you should look at the best FreshBooks alternatives.

Here are three great alternatives for FreshBooks.

Quickbooks

QuickBooks is a comprehensive business and financial management suite with tools for accounting, stock, payroll, tax filing, invoicing, bank account tracking and reconciliation, cost management, budgeting, payment processing, and accounts receivable and payable management.

FreshBooks offers an excellent feature set for small businesses, but if your company is scaling up, QuickBooks Online is likely to be a better option.

Start free trial of QuickBooks today

Other options: Best FreshBooks alternatives

Wave Accounting

Wave Accounting is a cloud-based accounting software that includes standard features such as invoicing, expense tracking, and payroll.

FreshBooks limits the number of chargeable clients that can be added to its Lite and Plus accounts, whereas Wave offers free limitless invoicing for an infinite number of customers.

Create your free account of Wave today!

Zoho Invoice

Zoho Invoice is an invoicing software that enables professionals to manage their accounts in an organized and efficient manner. It allows users to create and send invoices and estimates, collect payments, track time, and record expenses.

This software is completely free of cost and is a great option especially if you’re a part of the larger Zoho community.

Try Zoho Invoice for free today!

Getting Started with FreshBooks

FreshBooks is a sophisticated cloud-based invoicing and accounting software designed for service-based enterprises, freelancers, and independent contractors.

It offers great features like customizable invoicing, customer service, and powerful project management capabilities. The software enables small businesses to bill clients, track expenses, handle payments, and much more.

Start professional invoicing with FreshBooks today!

FAQs

Related reading:

• FreshBooks vs. QuickBooks
• FreshBooks vs. Xero