It takes a special kind of person to like accounting. I have taken more than my fair share of number crunching, debit-and-credit-tossing classes. In fact, I don’t usually use an accountant for my own businesses unless it is end of year tax time, or I have some crazy weird question.
With that being said, my accounting app of choice is Quickbooks. It’s easy, somewhat intuitive, and is universally accepted. A bit like Microsoft, I guess. But there is one thing it doesn’t do well - invoice with options of online payment.
Most of my clients prefer email invoices. And frankly, I prefer to be paid online. Especially when it is something small like a couple-hundred-dollar maintenance invoice. There is always the Paypal plugin for Quickbooks, but it isn’t that pretty and doesn’t integrate very well.
A couple weeks ago, I stumbled on FreshBooks.com and haven’t looked back. It’s rare that I get this jazzed about an accounting application, or any app for that matter, but this one is special. Freshbooks does the normal invoicing thing, but it lets you choose if you want to send it by post office mail or email it! Once your client gets the invoice, they can log in and pay it, or just mail you back a check. If they choose to pay you online, they can send the payment through any number of services such as Paypal, Authorize.net, Amazon Payments, and a bunch of other ones.
Perhaps my favorite features though, are the newly integrated expense tracking (for those late night bar crawls that you desperately try to expense out…) and the time tracking. They are great for small businesses that aren’t centrally located and have people working on projects all over the world. Plus, with an open API, any number of other applications can integrate with it.
To check out the fully-functional, free demo just click the link! And if anyone knows of any other cool resources like Freshbooks, let us know!!