FreshBooks vs Word and Excel
People sometimes ask us, “Why is FreshBooks better than Word or Excel?”
That’s an easy one. Excel/Word are really not the right tool for invoicing. Excel and Word make the following things difficult:
- getting a snapshot of who owes you what
- generating reports
- formatting invoices
- accepting payments
- searching for invoices
- updating your records when payments come in
- sending invoices
- automating recurring invoices and credit card charges
When you cobble all these things together, each one is a real pain with Word and/or Excel. If you have a solution that does them all right, it takes the pain out of billing and saves you time. That is exactly what FreshBooks users tell us the service does for them.
Here is another scenario: just think of a folder full of invoices that you created with Excel/Word. How much useful information can you get from that folder at a glance? You can’t tell the balance of an invoice or who it was for, what items were included or what is the balance outstanding. That’s not really receivables management and not knowing will cost you time.
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9:12 am
Hmmm…….
Freshbooks is fine as far as it goes but it falls very far short of the reporting power and flexibility of even a relatively low-end computer based system like MYOB, which offers lots of things that Freshbooks doesn’t: eg multicurrency, custom invoice design, line by line discounting (I may want to discount someone’s order but I sure don’t want to discount the freight charge, for example).
Freshbooks scores first and foremost by being on the Net. We find that using it in tandem with Excel, or rather Google Spreadsheets, works pretty well.