I am always on the look­out for billing/invoicing soft­ware, whether it is stand­alone soft­ware or web-based soft­ware, because such soft­ware eases the pain of keep­ing track of projects. I am a spread­sheet kind of per­son, but find it too painful to keep track of projects, tasks, and clients within Excel. There are count­less online choices avail­able but for this month I am tak­ing a look at FreshBooks.

First and fore­most, I like prod­ucts that allow one to test-drive it before throw­ing down any money for it. With FreshBooks, all fea­tures are avail­able for the free also known as the Moped option. The only lim­i­ta­tion of this Moped option is that the max­i­mum num­ber of clients one can man­age per month is lim­ited to three. Since I’m cur­rently work­ing on one big project, this is fine with me.

The cre­ation of invoices and man­age­ment of time-tracking at the two fea­tures that I use the most. The invoic­ing fea­ture is easy to use and designed well. The option to sub­mit invoices through snail mail are avail­able but I opt to use the mod­ern email func­tion­al­ity. Since my cur­rent project is based on the time that I devote towards it, I find the time-tracking fea­ture to be invalu­able. The time-tracking fea­ture will dis­play accu­mu­lated hours by day, week, and month. Hours can be entered man­u­ally or you can use the timer which func­tions as a stop­watch within the browser. I down­loaded the FreshBooks Dashboard wid­get for Mac OS X which will log the hours for a spe­cific project using an API key that is gen­er­ated from the FreshBook account.

Other FreshBook fea­tures include the gen­er­a­tion of esti­mates, the track­ing of work-related expenses, and the man­age­ment of addi­tional staff assigned to projects. The team fea­ture allows for col­lab­o­ra­tion on a spe­cific project which is use­ful for times when a sin­gle project may be too large for one per­son to man­age. Finally, FreshBooks gen­er­ates numer­ous reports to keep track of finances, invoices, and timesheets. I have not used FreshBooks long enough to see the results of many reports, and I am not even using all of its fea­tures at the moment. I am pleased with it and hope to see how well it works for me in the future.