Business App of the Week: Freshbooks Cloud Accounting

Running a small business today comes with its share of challenges. Successful management of accounts and invoices can make or break the success of a business. Sometimes you have a great idea and a talented team, but the accounting side of things can be difficult to get a grasp on. This week we’re going to take a look at a great little web app that can help you to stay on top of the books, even with little or no experience in accounting.

When you look at accounting apps there are plenty of options out there, but not all are created equal. FreshBooks is a cloud accounting solution that takes the complexity out of managing the financial side of your business in an easy to use interface that could save you thousands on accounting expenses. Aimed at small and medium sized businesses, FreshBooks lets you manage your accounting at any time and place, from almost any device.

FreshBooks will appeal most to businesses providing products and services, who deal with a large number of invoices. Invoicing is an important part of accounting, obviously because it allows your business to get paid. In business it’s not just about your own operation, but serving your customers too. That’s a big part of why over five million businesses around the world choose FreshBooks. Not only does it streamline your own accounting process, it lets you invoice customers instantly and easily, providing a smoother customer experience that can make your company stand out.

A big requirement for businesses of any size is the ability to receive online payments and provide online billing services. As a cloud service, FreshBooks understands the need for fast and simple internet based solutions. When you use FreshBooks you can get paid faster, and streamline the billing process for your customers by incorporating credit card payments and PayPal transactions in to your business. Your customers will be able to pay you from anywhere with ease, and there’s also options for 12 of the most popular payment gateways around the world.

Most businesses are also consumers too, in the way that they rely on the services of other companies to carry out their own line of business. FreshBooks allows you to import and capture expenses for your own records, or to re-bill them to customers for services that you have provided. It really is an all in one solution, and for small businesses that’s a massive benefit.

We mentioned that FreshBooks will allow you to take your accounting anywhere. This is achieved by giving you cloud access through any web browser, or through the FreshBooks iOS and Android applications. Staff can bill from the road, and for a telecommuting business without a centralized site, FreshBooks is perfect. Being based in the cloud, there’s also the possibility for strong collaboration between your staff who can share projects and invoices through the FreshBooks app or web interface. Security is not an issue because everything is secured with 256-bit encryption, so you’ll know that the privacy of every transaction remains intact.

There are so many options in FreshBooks that it’s hard to get through all of them without just trying the app for yourself. You can use FreshBooks for time based work to automatically clock and calculate invoices, you can import clients from external databases, and you can grow your portfolio within FreshBooks as your business grows. There’s so much added value that FreshBooks provides over simple invoice generation, that it would be hard to recommend any other cloud accounting solution.

In a small business, streamlined back of house tasks are essential. FreshBooks helps you to achieve that streamlining, giving you more time to focus on running and growing your business.