FreeAgent

FreeAgent, an online “accounting” software apt for freelancers for charing hourly rates and tracking freelance projects. Even though FreeAgent offers Bills and Expense tracking and has some basic reporting elements, we do not encourage to start your business accouting with FreeAgent.


Getting Started
FreeAgent offers a simple dashboard, that list couple of vital key perfomance indicators. Even though we encountered infinite loading in after “Save & Finish”, we are not pooling this issue for rating purposes. We liked the simple getting started process in the application.
The main chart on the dashboard captures cash basis transactions, which is mainly targeted at freelancers and small businesses which prefere Cash basis of accounting to Accrual.
The overall layout of FreeAgent looks different, not necessarily intuitive as we did not capture widely used, customers, suppliers, purchases, sales, etc. Yet the idea of having a master “add new” button is an interesting.
Adding Contacts
Adding a customer in FreeAgent is not as straightforward when it comes to understanding certain fields, which you may not need, but certainly takes your second thought when you come across “Contact-level Invoice Sequence”. Obviously, you would to read a user guide to understand what that implies.
Assuming you liked FreeAgent at this stage, you are willing to bulk upload your customers into the application. FreeAgent provisions it, however it imposes quite a bit of limitations. Again, as we usually do, we took CSV files from famouse accounting solutions, and created one manually and populated with customer data. But it turns out, you cannot import custom CSV files, and instead requires Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, and Freshbooks formats.
Invoicing
Invoicing in FreeAgent is a two step process, in the first step you define header information of an invoice, such as date, terms, currency and notes. In the last user can define line items of an invoice. This is interesting implementation, a unique one. However, usability wise, two step process is redundant.
So we started creating an invoice, and clicked back button to change the invoice header information and wanted to proceed further, which outputs an error “1 error prohibited this invoice from being saved. Reference has already been used“. We understand the alert, however, our users simply wanted to update header information to reflect in invoices. 
Adding an item in FreeAgent seemed easy to us, but really not logical. When selecting from the list of preset items, you come across “Comments”, “Expenses”, “Bills”, which is alien to double entry accounting systems. As FreeAgent is allowing to charge for an expense without ever incurring it. Some basic validations would be a good start.
As for emailing invoice, FreeAgent provides a nice email template, yet list of variables is not complete to create really custom emails.
Expenses
FreeAgent allows expense and milage register, and we find it quite convenient. There is no continuous workflow if you need to add an expense category when creating it. You would need to make sure in Settings first. On top of that, when you are creating an expense, or lets call it,w hen you are writing off a check, there is no option to choose a bank account.  All of our users were puzzled when creating an expense in FreeAgent, as creating is easy, but you are doing it without a bank account. Thus, we wonder what is the purpose of this expense, and it is totally way off double-entry.
Inventory
In FreeAgent you can receive one item only once, and you would to do manual valuation of your stock each time you buy if you want to track invetory value on their Balance Sheet report. But this is quite an immature inventory control, if anyhow it can be called.
Reports
FreeAgent keeps surprising in every implemention or imitatation of double-entry accounting. When we looked into basic reports, we were astonished to see Debits and Credits. To be frank this is not where they should be, but in general ledger or account transactions. If you can “goose” a flying gun, that does not make sense, this is what FreeAgent does in reports and transactions recording.
So, it is advisable for FreeAgent to pick up Accounting 101 and scan financial reports templates, that would be awesome.
Conclusion
FreeAgent is not a double-entry accounting and is very restrictive and mind challenging. If all you do is invoicing, surely you can use FreeAgent. Other than that, we do not recommend FreeAgent as an accounting software at all, as it was very stressful to walk through the system and find wrong implementation of basic accounting principles.