I recently signed up for a Freshbooks account because I constantly heard about it from other freelancers. The purpose of this site is to make invoicing clients, collecting payments, creating estimates and organizing clients quick, easy and professional. There are a choice of accounts that range from free (limited to 3 clients) to paid, with the next account $20 a month and on up. I already had a homemade system in place where I had nicely designed quotes and invoices, and I used Paypal to invoice and collect money. I keep all my deposits and expenses in a nicely designed auto-computed Numbers sheet. So how did they stack up against each other?

Freshbooks

Pros: Freshbooks keeps everything in one place, and can be accessed anywhere with an internet connection. It allowed me to create client profiles and to easily create estimates, and then to turn those estimates into invoices. It also automatically reminds late-paying clients, and keeps track of who has paid and who hasn’t. This is also supposed to make you look more professional, although all they do is slap your logo on the right hand side of their template, which you can do easily in Word.

Cons: My biggest con is that it costs money. As a home-office single-person business I need to closely watch my expenses, and not fall into the trap of paying for things I don’t need (which means some sacrificing). Freshbooks only allows 3 clients for their free account and their next account comes in at $20 (for 25 client profiles). While this may not be expensive for people with larger clients, I tend to have a lot of clients who bring in small $200-$500 projects, so 25 clients can add up quickly. Freshbooks also doesn’t have their own payment gateway, and since I use Paypal (you can pay with or without a Paypal account), I would have to add their fee on top of Paypal’s. Freshbooks doesn’t allow you to import previous invoices and paying clients, and since it’s October, I already had a lot of previous invoices and didn’t want to keep track of two systems. While this may be eliminated by starting at the beginning of the year, I’m inpatient. (yea yea). Also, I didn’t like that you couldn’t customize the fields in the invoices. (Why do I need quantity or item numbers?)

Homemade Organization

Pros: It’s free. If you’re a designer or have some semblance of a designer eye, you can easily create your own templates from home that look just as professional as Freshbooks. You can also customize these completely to what you need.

Cons: It’s a few more steps to keep up with everything. However, I keep a nice folder in my dock with all my paperwork and it’s really only 3 documents: Invoice template (which I rarely use unless the client asks for an itemized invoice, otherwise I use Paypal), my Quote template, and my 2009 Income & Expenses sheet. Pretty quick and easy and perhaps not a con at all…I hardly ever need to refer back to the written quotes, but I keep those saved under the client’s folder. It’s not as glamorous as Freshbooks (I tend to love those kind of programs) and it may be seen as less professional to some, however I think it’s more professional to have your own set of documents rather than using a pre-built system. Also, with my home organization it doesn’t come with automatic reminders and I have to manually keep up with who’s paid and who hasn’t (which I do with a small calendar on my wall).

So which did I go with?

I decided to stay with my home system. It’s one less bill I have to pay, and it already works well for me. Back when I first started freelancing (about 4 years ago now) I fell into the trap of over-organization. I paid a lot of money for fancy office stuff, fancy organizing programs and the works. What did this do? I actually wasted more time trying to keep up with these programs and more money paying for them – so I got less work done and made less money.

Is Freshbooks for you?

Freshbooks may be the thing for you if you’re very undisciplined with organization. Also, if you have a TON of clients (rockstar?) and it’s unfeasible to use a Numbers (or Excel) sheet to keep up with them all, then Freshbooks is probably great for you. If you’re a small freelancer like me, I wouldn’t waste the money. You can do it for free yourself, and use that $20 for a latte at Starbucks šŸ˜‰

Amber Weinberg

Amber is a freelance front-end developer specializing in semantic and accessible custom WordPress themes. She works with agencies and other freelancers to bring their designs to life using custom ACF flexible layout builds - making them more performant and less buggy while allowing the client easy customization without breaking the design system.