I am not gonna sugarcoat it for you. Accounting is not my favorite thing. If I am honest, accounting is not one of my top 100 favorite things to do. I have stumbled across a tool called Freshbooks. I love it because it makes accounting almost fun for me, and that’s a huge step for me in the right direction. I never liked accounting. Staying awake during my accounting course in college was mission impossible for me. Let’s face it there are some things you simply can’t succeed without. One of them is understanding your finances.

If you are going to build a successful business there is a good chance that you will do any or all of the following:

  • Do your books
  • Send invoices
  • Create estimates
  • Track your time
  • Prepare reports

We have used other small business accounting software for our business in the past, but it was a painful experience.

There several aspects of the other accounting software that frustrated us over the years:

  • Clunky online banking integration.
  • Their software was not built with the web in mind. It is about as far from “Cloud” as a hot August day in Scottsdale, Arizona.
  • We had to update it every year, which is code for “pay us more money again even though we haven’t really improved our software one bit”.
  • Dealing with backups for different versions of the software would frustrate my business partner and me to no end.
  • The software would crash repeatedly.
  • Bloated software linked to pop-up advertising. If you are charging me for your software, don’t litter my screen with pop-up advertising.
  • Overall, I always felt that everything took too many steps. Somehow it seemed that somebody at their company was getting extra brownie points for adding more unnecessary steps to use the software.
  • Poor support. Why is it that the larger a company becomes the less it cares about the very people that got them there?
  • The list goes on-and-on.

Here are some of the main reasons I love Freshbooks:

  • Seamless integration with online banking.
  • Freshbooks was built for the web.
  • Freshbooks is simple to use.
  • You can try it for free.
  • Freshbooks is great for invoices, estimates, expenses, time tracking, and reports.
  • Did I mention that they also have great support?

I love that I can create a new invoice in just a couple of minutes.

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I love that I can track my time for all the work I do for my clients.

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If you want a quick snapshot of your financials, Freshbooks makes it easy.

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Now that I have been using Freshbooks for a while I realize that I have less trouble with accounting because I am using a simple tool. I still don’t love accounting, but I almost like it now.

 

In the “comments” let me know what accounting software you are using in your business.