FreshBooks is an excellent online invoicing and time-tracking service that is the best choice for freelancers and sole proprietors looking to get control of their customer activity and to track basic expenses. The cloud software is priced somewhat less than the two leading small business cloud packages, Intuit QuickBooks Online and Xero, as is appropriate for accounting software that isn't a double-entry accounting service. Freelancers and sole proprietors don't necessarily need an application that's compliant with generally-accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, for short. They will, however, appreciate that FreshBooks’ user experience, invoicing, and time-tracking tools are state of the art.

FreshBooks does feature a dashboard like more expensive cloud software.  A “dashboard” provides a quick overview of a user’s business financial status, including “Outstanding Revenue” (tells you who owes the business money and who is behind on payments); “Total Profit” (gives the user a real-time number for the business’ current profit or loss); and “Spending” (displays business expenses by category). Links to commonly used reports (Accounts Aging, Invoice Details, Time Entry Details, etc.) lie below these graphs.

The software provides a menu that can access core areas like Invoices, Estimates, Clients, Expenses, Projects, and Time Tracking. Like all other online accounting software, to fully engage the power of FreshBooks users need to set up login credentials for financial institutions at which the user has business accounts. The software connects to their sites and imports account transactions. And by signing up for FreshBooks Payments or Stripe users can start accepting credit cards.

Managing billing and invoicing with FreshBooks is a simple task. As with Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed of Xero Early/Growing, FreshBooks' designers have done a good job organizing features in the software's user interface. The Invoice screen actually contains a lot of information, and users can quickly access invoices created, sent, and received, as well as those that have been viewed and paid.

FreshBooks offers built-in project-management tools not available in Intuit QuickBooks Online and only available for additional cost in Xero. Users can give a project a name, assign it to a client or internal staff so they can collaborate and report hours, and enter an hourly budget and end date. Billing options include hourly or flat project rate.

Like other cloud software products, FreshBooks offers Android and iOS apps. These apps provide for less functionality than that in a web application, but appropriate for mobile devices. There is a dashboard that contains the three critical charts, as well as additional tools that include Expenses, Time Tracking, Clients, Estimates, and Invoices. Users will be able to see if invoices have been viewed or paid, and exchange messages with customers.

We heartily recommend FreshBooks for sole proprietors. For other businesses we recommend Xero with their Gusto payroll partnership as the best mix of usability and functionality. For those that prefer Intuit’s robust reporting, legacy account registers, or a multi-level chart of accounts, we recommend QuickBooks Online.