It’s Fall – harvest time – so what better time to talk about invoicing – or reaping your harvest.
When we start working with a client who is crazy busy but not able to pay the bills – often one of the main culprits is not getting their invoices out the door. Whether it’s because they are fussing over exact wording, design or are simply exhausted and aren’t prioritizing one of the most important tasks in their business.
We use Freshbooks for tracking our time and invoicing – it links directly to PayPal allowing our clients to quickly and easily pay us, has apps for our phones to track time on the go and more. Moving to Freshbooks reduced my invoicing time from hours to minutes each month, it can pull time from your teams timesheets, generate auto-invoices for clients on packages and provides a number of reports to let you properly manage and track the money coming into your company. What it doesn’t do is offer full bookkeeping support – so an accounting software is needed.
Unfortunately, up until now, Freshbooks did not talk to Quickbooks or any other mainstream accounting software. This meant that each month I had to manually enter all of our invoices into Quickbooks which was extremely time consuming. Despite this time consuming flaw we still recommended Freshbooks to any of our clients who had a team and needed to track time because it is so easy to use and monitor what was happening in your company.
Well today I received some great news in my inbox – Freshbooks is about to introduce the ability to export into an .iff file (otherwise known as the file needed to import into Quickbooks Pro). We have signed up to be Beta Testers and I will post here to let you know how it goes.
Until next time – make sure to get those invoices out.
Updated August 15, 2017 – since writing this article QuickBooks has launched QuickBooks Online and syncs with 100’s of really great apps. If you want to learn how to streamline your bookkeeping contact us.