The wonderful world of Freshbooks

For a few years, I was on the hunt for a software that would make my life of invoicing, time tracking, expenses and client management a bit less time consuming and definitely less frustrating. As Greenline Creative grew, so did our need to find this product. We needed something fast, user friendly and ascetically pleasing, but above all we needed a system that could help us function as a productive studio, but without the overhead. We tried about a half a dozen different software throughout that time and everything managed to fall short. Either too complicated for our needs, or they didn't offer everything we needed in one system. At the time of creating Greenline Creative, we settled on Quickbooks. Why? Because that was the norm. Was Quickbooks nice? Yes, but for the designer in me I was striving for something that was clean and clear. Striving for something that we could use that made our business run smoothly internally and for our clients. We wanted a solution that took the pain out of estimates and invoicing and made plugging in expenses actually enjoyable to do and accurate.

Did we find it? Yes! We found it 4 months ago from a friend of ours who owns Seekant Interactive. He mentioned he was going to give a system called Freshbooks a try. He didn't know too much about it, so we both started the free trial together. I must confess, after one evening playing with the free trial, watching the overview, I knew this was the system for me. I went and updated my account to allow me to manage all of my clients and I have not turned back. Freshbooks by far has been the single greatest business investment I have made for Greenline Creative. With the ability to plug in clients, manage projects and set your rates for individual tasks, track the time and then convert that into an invoice has made estimating and invoicing clients bullet proof.

Beyond the numerous internal features like managing contractors and team members. It is wonderful on the client side. Our clients both small start-ups, to large creative agencies, love the ability to see the activity on their project, dispute or accept an estimate, see outstanding balances, send files and communicate to us through their own client portal, that is strictly accessed by only them. What does that mean? Each client has their own piece of Freshbooks that is not only managed by Greenline Creative, but allowing them to stay current throughout their project.

As a small business finding this product that doesn't increase our overhead for our clients ans has assisted us in running a "paperless" studio, has been a gift. It by far is the single most used software in our company next to Adobe. I encourage anyone looking to break out of Quicken to visit the Freshbooks website, view the video overview and sign-up for a free trial. The features and benefits of this product is limitless and they are always updating this software to fit a variety of needs.

In short, we at Greenline Creative recommend this software to anyone in the hunt for a budget friendly solution to keep all your records in one place, and wanting a functional product that makes doing the mundane and time consuming tasks much more efficient and enjoyable. As a huge advocate I have helped many new users to Freshbooks learn how to make this system work for them and understand many of the features that Freshbooks has to offer. If you would like to contact me with any questions, feel free to do so.

Dennis Field :: Creative Director & Partner