Freshbooks

Freshbooks – Online Invoicing System, wrongly named as Cloud Accounting for some reason is a nice invoicing system for freelancers and startups who need no more than then just an awesome invoicing app, yet we hardly believe that Accountants may love the system due to lack of double-entry, adjusting capabilities, etc. It lacks most of core accounting functionalities and its great user inteface is not inline with basic concepts of accounting and imposes unproportional high learning curve for such simple functionalities.
Since Freshbooks claims to be an accounting solution, we will regard it so in this review.



Getting Started
Signing up and getting started in Freshbooks is intuitive, and provides overall guidelines on its dashboard.
Creating a customer and adding contacts is straightforward. Optionally you may opt to import contacts from your listing, however it is very inflexible to use their importing feature. First of all, Freshbooks offers only Outlook and Freshbooks Compatible format (no idea what compatible format is). CSV format has been a standard, and not being able to bulk upload a custom CSV file is cumbersome or as we called it – WRONG and we could not bulk upload customers. CSV templates that we tried to import were from existing accounting software.
Invoicing
Invoicing, as it  is meant for, is great. However, if clients do not have any email, you are not invoicing them. Freshbooks basically states invoice transactions must go through email. It is a matter of personal taste, however leaving email as transaction trigger is a bit lame.
Custom email template is not really a custom. If you exclude logo from an invoice, there is no more customization left.   You are either choosing a Classic Layout or a Clean Layout invoice.
Expenses
Adding customer was an easy task. Now you might be interested in adding a supplier or vendor. Two words most widely accepted naming is disregarded in Freshbooks. Look for “Contractor” instead. However, you cannot add a supplier without any email. For a person willing to track bills from suppliers, email may not always be an option. Most likely, Freshbooks is superimposing their strategy of inviting your suppliers into the system over your need to track basic bills. Sad… Freshbooks looked ok for simple finance, but imposing a lot of restrictions for just recording purposes.

Registering expenses looks simple, yet inflexible for accounting systems and totally weird for us.

• You cannot add multiple expense items. Thus each check you write or expense you incurred you will register separately.
• No idea how to track expenses paid and from what bank account

Bills tracking is another disappointment.  You can register bills or how they call it “Received Invoices” only by inviting your suppliers into the system.  If your suppliers are not in Freshbooks, use spreadsheet or track separately if you are much into using this app.
User Management
Freshbooks offers a basic user management, that is, you can add your sales people who can invoice and register expenses as well as contractors, who can see invoices issued to them. As for custom user role management, there is none. Which means you cannot create a custom user group, assign custom roles and permissions to users you invite into the system. Even though Freshbooks offers some user management it is not providing proper segregation of duties that an accounting software should be providing.
Freshbooks is not an accounting software, yet, as I mentioned, we are regarding it as an accounting software judging by their bold statement on their home page.
Inventory Management
Freshbooks does not have it at all. In fact you should not be expecting any balance sheet report from this “Cloud Accounting” application as you cannot track inventory value on hand. (Accounting 101, basic financial statements  are P&L, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, Retained Earnings).
All it allows is quantity management, that is, how many left.




Document Management
As we followed Freshbooks for new features, we were delighted to hear that as of recently you can upload documents in the system. As it turned out, you can attach files, specifically receipts into your expenses and only. However, in most cases, businesses if sending invoice via email would usually attach files, contracts, etc… Much ado, about so little.

Conclusion
Freshbooks is a nice invoicing application, and it not a double entry accounting suite. Thus, if you run a small business Overall user experience with Freshbooks from accountants and non-accountants perspectives state that designers’ vision superimposes basic accounting concepts, and does not provide expected logical workflow. Freshbooks, however, tries to compensate it be offering in-application guide per screen, but for simple functionalities it provides, things could have been  much easier.
To understand why Freshbooks, as an “accounting” software scores 32.6%, (31/95) check our comparison page.