New feature: Received invoices

What’s New?
Now you can accept invoices from other FreshBooks users inside your account.

We added this capability because we had requests from customers who were receiving invoices from other FreshBooks users and wanted a way to get organized. So we implemented this feature and it’s available from your invoices tab:

How does it work?
When you view an invoice sent to you from another FreshBooks user, you will be asked if you want invoices from this person to appear in your FreshBooks account. Click “Yes”, and your existing and future invoices from this user will appear in your “Received Invoices” sub-tab.

Convert received invoices to expenses
There’s more to received invoices than just staying organized. We’ve also made it quick and simple to convert a received invoice into an expense, perfect for re-billing to a client:

For those of you who receive invoices in currencies other than the currency of your FreshBooks account, you will be prompted to set an appropriate change to the amount of your expense.

Estimates too

Once you choose to receive invoices from another account, estimates sent from that same account will show in your “Received Estimates” sub-tab, and vice versa.

Why receiving invoices (and estimates) matters
I used to do a lot of project work with contractors, and because my contractors and I both brought new business to each other, I used to find it really difficult and time consuming to figure out who owed who what.

For example, I ran a web design shop. We often worked with a local developer named Ben. If I invited Ben onto three projects and he invited me onto four - all of this over a 2 month period - we wound up have no clue what we owed each other, and to figure it out would take a lot of work. We’ve solved this problem with the receiving invoices tab.

Now every time I send Ben work, he replies with an invoice or estimate, and I receive it inside my account. Likewise if he sends me work instead. With FreshBooks as our record keeper it only takes a minute to answer the question, “who owes who what”? That saves a lot of time, and helps me understand your cashflow which is incredibly important.

Psst, pass the word on
For those of you who have a lot of vendors sending you invoices, you might want to consider encouraging these vendors to invoice you using FreshBooks - it’s a really nice way to keep things organized.