New Tool Tuesday: FreshBooks

When it comes to invoicing blog clients for products or services — things like my social media makeover consultations, banner ads, sponsored posts, etc. — I tend to use two tools: PayPal and FreshBooks.

I thought it was about time I shared some of the details of FreshBooks, because it’s free (there are paid plans as well), super professional and very easy to use.

Some of the features you get:

• time tracking/timesheets
• project management
• invoices
• receipt management
• estimate generator
• electronic reports
• status tracker (see when the client opened documents, responded to, etc.)

Invoices can be emailed, exported as PDFs and more, and because it’s all electronic, FreshBooks can actually track the status of payments and other items.

With the free plan, which I use, you can manage three clients at a time. But you can delete and re-add as you need. So if I have three clients in the system and I pick up a fourth, I just delete one of the non-active clients. This would be an issue if I had more than three active clients at a time, of course, but since all of this work is done at night and on weekends, I really limit myself to a manageable amount of projects.

Clients have the option of paying the invoices online, sending a check, etc., and I find that this takes some of the stress out of building and using contracts. I put all of the deliverables into the estimates and the invoices so that there’s no question about what the client is receiving, what the due dates are, etc.

Now go forth and invoice!