You’re Comfortable Accounting With Word and Excel—So Why Change?

I get it. You’re used to billing your clients the way you’ve done it since you can remember. You’ve mastered Excel and have a methodical system of generating, saving, and sending invoices to your clients.

I won’t even get you started on how versed you are with Microsoft Word. That visual template you created for your Word invoices is pretty sharp!

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    You’ve really got accounting in the bag. Billing and collecting payments isn’t an issue for you. Your method hasn’t caused any huge problems and you’ve used the same tools for years.

    If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Plus, it’s free! With zero cost to your business. No learning curve, no worries. So why change?

    Chances Are You’re Making More Mistakes on Word and Excel

    Sure, you get a bit frustrated when your Excel formatting goes awry every now and then, but you can fix that in a few minutes since you’re familiar with the software. Time is money, but you didn’t spend much of it correcting the document.

    And there was that time you saved over an estimate. You forgot what was quoted to your potential client. But that wasn’t a big deal. You requested the client to send back their received estimate so you could save it again. It didn’t seem too unprofessional—having to ask your client to send the estimate back to you, right?



    You’re Not Getting Paid on Time—and It’s Costing You

    What about when your cash flow came to a complete halt because of a mail stoppage?

    You were thinking it would have been handy to add an online payment option within your Excel invoice. After a few non-sufficient fund fees and some business purchases on credit, again, everything eventually worked out despite the headache.

    Tax Time Isn’t Always as Effortless as You Wished

    Then comes your absolute favorite time of year, tax season. It’s a thrill if you’re able to get your reports together without a hitch, but that rarely happens.

    It’s not a stretch to say that you live in fear of being audited since you’ve never been completely confident in your Excel reporting. After all, you had to build these from scratch and human error can be unavoidable even from the best of us.

    What If There Was a Better Way?

    What if you could streamline your billing, collect payments online, and generate automatic reports to make things way, way easier? I’m talking ‘ridiculously easy’.

    What if you could:

    Speed Through Your Invoicing

    FreshBooks allows you to generate invoices at the speed of light. You can use multiple templates, customizing them to suit your billing needs.

    With an interface so simple you could navigate with your eyes closed, this leaves you more time to do what you love. Unless you’re an accountant, I’m sure you’d prefer spending less time staring at spreadsheets and updating cells.

    Get Paid Faster

    The dream of invoice payments rolling into your bank account days after sending bills to clients can become a reality.

    Enabling a way for your client to enter credit card information right onto the invoice was a fantasy addition to your Excel invoice template, but with FreshBooks it’s a feature that you can set up in minutes.

    Breeze Through Tax Season

    Calling tax time fun may be a stretch in any case. But with FreshBooks’ ability to generate tax season reports in just a few clicks, you can feel confident that the results are accurate and less concerned about being audited.



    Let Cloud Accounting Be Your Solution

    I know that the comfort of familiarity can be strong, especially with tools you’ve deemed essential to your business for years. But picture a world where you’re spending a lot less time generating bills, collecting payments, and piecing together reports and consider the leap to a platform meant for freelancers just like you.

    FreshBooks has a free 30-day trial and a wonderful support team in your corner to help you with the change. I know that once you’re set up with the FreshBooks app (on both your computer and phone, so you have access anywhere you are!) you’ll wonder why you didn’t make the move sooner.

    about the author

    Director of Support, FreshBooks Colin is a Director of Support at FreshBooks. He brings a unique perspective to the FreshBooks blog with his extensive background in people management and customer service. Fun fact: He is also a ‘serial hobbyist’ with collections ranging from taxidermy to vintage sunglasses.

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