Online Invoicing: FreshBooks or Cashboard?


I tweeted recently that I was doing my invoicing and that I needed to find another way of doing it. Two suggestions I got from people were FreshBooks and Cashboard. I checked out both and signed up for the free trials.

Feature wise both FreshBooks and Cashboard offer similar things. Invoicing, recurring invoicing, time tracking, estimates and reports. A couple features that FreshBooks offers is the ability to enter expenses and snail mail an invoice to clients that do not have email. Cashboard has expense tracking on their being developed feature list so I image that will be added soon.

Recurring invoicing is one of the tasks I tend to get behind on and it was the main reason for me to look at finding a new method to do my invoicing. Both FreshBooks and Cashboard offer a recurring invoicing system and from what I can see they both work fairly similar. Invoices are created automatically and clients can then login and either download and print the invoice and depending on your payment options pay you online. This feature alone will save me several hours a month and my clients will no longer have to wait for me to get the invoice out to them. It also gives me a great overview of how much regular money I have coming in every month.

The tracking project time is another nice feature and again I could not see a great deal of difference between FreshBooks and Cashboard. Both offer time tracking based on projects and tasks. Cashboard does allow you to create an invoice from your tracked time, I was not certain if Freshbooks is able to do that. I still track much of my time using a spreadsheet on Google Docs because I often have GMail and Google Docs open while I work.

Invoicing in both systems is similar, but I did notice that Cashboard allows you to attach a PDF to the email when you are sending an invoice by email. This is a nice feature that means the client does not have to go and download the invoice from the Internet. It would be nice if the recurring invoices allowed that as well on Cashboard. FreshBooks does not appear to attach a PDF file to the email when invoices are emailed out. FreshBooks does however allow you to send a snail mail invoice so that could be a real plus for those people that have clients that do not have email (is that possible anymore?).

I have to say I am impressed by the features of both FreshBooks and Cashboard. At this point I am leaning towards signing up for Cashboard mainly because of Cashboard being slightly less expensive for the features I need. Hopefully soon I will be on my way to invoicing heaven.

What do you use to do your invoicing and why?

Categories: tools 
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