Five smart things you can do in your FreshBooks account

Beyond invoicing and keeping track of who’s paid you, there’s a ton of other stuff you can do with your FreshBooks account that you may not know about.

Here’s a quick sampling of tweaks & tips to save you time, get you paid even faster, and ease pain points in your business:

1. Automate Payment Reminders

Your FreshBooks account can automatically ping customers to remind them they owe you money and even follow up again when they’re late paying.

Hop into your Settings link in your FreshBooks account. Click on the Emails sub-navigation tab. Click the edit link next to Late Payment Reminders.

You can set up nagging emails to go out automatically at pre-defined times and use neat email “variables” to automatically plug things like the invoice amount or client name into the email template for you.

Play around with the options and the three different reminders you can set up. If you’re not sure how any of this works, just drop us a note. Set it, forget it: get paid!

2. Use Search for fast navigation and ad-hoc reporting

If you haven’t already found it, it’s worth checking out what you can do with the built-in Search feature in your FreshBooks account.

You’ll find the Search link at the top right of all list pages in your FreshBooks account, as shown here.

What you can search for changes automatically as you move through the system, with different search fields in your Client list, your Invoices list, your Expenses list, and in many other places throughout FreshBooks.

Try this, as just one example of what FreshBooks Search can do:

• From your Invoices tab, click on the Search link shown above;
• Now select “unpaid” from the Paid/Unpaid drop-down list on the right of the Search criteria screen;
• Click your Search button, and;
• Scroll to the bottom of the list and make sure to click the link to view all pages.

Bingo! That “Invoice Totals” number at the foot of your screen gives you a quick read on exactly how much money you’re owed by all your clients right now.

3. Manage sub-contractors’ time

As your business grows, you may find yourself pulling in help on projects from freelancers or other sub-contract colleagues.

If you depend on FreshBooks to track and manage the time you’re billing to clients, how awesome would it be to have sub-contractors’ timesheets running through the same system?

Without adding to your staff costs in FreshBooks you can totally do this.  You can invite contractors to bill time against your projects – they’ll get their own free FreshBooks account and you’ll get to see all their timesheets and invoices showing up right where you want them.

Now you’ve got all your contractor invoices in one place and in one format. When it’s time to invoice, you can instantly re-bill your clients for your contractors’ work with your own set mark-up.

Less chasing + less pain = woo!

4. Track & Categorize Expenses

In a small business, you’ve got to keep expenses under control, run lean and recover every cent you can.

Drive your business with your Profit & Loss report – it’s the clearest way to get an instant snapshot of how much you’re making and how much you’re spending. For it to work, though, you’ve got to log the expenses as well as what you’re billing out.

Entering expenses in your FreshBooks account couldn’t be easier. Here’s a few things you can and probably should set up:

• Recurring expenses that ding your business every month (think of your phone bill, office rent, equipment leases, etc.)
• Categories to make expense filing easy. We already put some pre-defined ones in your account, but you can easily add to or change these.
• “Cost of Goods Sold” expenses (materials costs, contractors’ bills, etc.) – you can define what gets counted into your costs from the Profit & Loss report.

5. Drive your business with CRM

As you’re getting serious about your growing business, juggling client relationships can get tricky.  You’ll want a system to help stay on top of your contacts and your sales pipeline.

FreshBooks looks after who’s paid you, who owes you money, who you’ve sent a quote to.  A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system can help you track who you’ve talked to, what you talked about, and what  you need to do next.

Better: a FreshBooks-integrated CRM tool makes this whole thing seamless. From a lead, to a prospect, to a customer, to an ongoing relationship in one smooth flow.

Check out the killer CRM partners in the FreshBooks Add-Ons directory.