If I were to answer the question “what are the critical tasks a freelance web designer must perform” in order to have an efficient and smooth business, my answer is “organization and efficiency”. Keeping an accurate track of your business is not an easy work, I agree, but it has its very important part. Well, the good news is that there are several good online financial tools available to make things easier. Taking into account that there are a number of 15 online great services and tools that can help a freelancer with billing and finances, there is nothing to worry about. It is true that most of these services or tools are not free, but you can take the advantages of the free plans or trials. However, my opinion is that, using these tools or services makes you save much money than you have expected, not talk about the fact that you’ll gain more accuracy and fewer headaches.
Consequently, I will make a brief review of these financial tools, and I will give you some details about their purpose and approach. All you will have to do after you have read this article is to choose the one that has the features you need. More on, I advise you to try some free versions or some trial periods so that you could decide better.
XE Currency Converter can be a great option if you are working with people from different parts of the world. It is a very easy to use tool: you have only to enter the sum, the currency you have to convert from and the currency you have to convert to and the calculation will be made immediately. In my opinion, it is a useful tool when you have to bill your clients or to send out quotes. I must not forget to add that the conversion with XE costs you nothing.
Fresh Books is a great option for the online invoicing that I warmly recommend you. It has a lot of useful features: you can make invoices, you can track them, and you can create and send quotes. Besides all these, you can track clients, expenses and the way in which your time is generally spent. If you opt for Fresh Book free version, you will be allowed to manage only three clients. For 14$ to 149$ a month you can receive a lot of great services.
Less Accounting was created as a very simple accounting solution. If you want to create, to send and to track your invoices, to record or to track your expenses then choose Less Accounting. There are other options available here: you can have a free access to your accounting whenever you want to export data, you can also import bank transactions, and you can handle the tax of the sales. The prices differ depending on your needs, but you can also opt for the free version or the monthly payment for full services is of 24$.
Free Agent is perfect for small business and freelancers. With Free Agent, you can control your time and your project; you can make your invoices and email them to your clients. More on, these services help you to track all your invoices, to manage your bank accounts and to estimate the sales tax. All I can add here is that Free Agent offers you a free version for a month without any obligation to continue to work with them. After this first free month, you have to pay 20$ a month.
Cashboard is also a good choice. It also offers you the possibility to create, send and track your invoices and online payments or to create your estimates. Cashboard offers you a free account. Anyway, all the paid versions have a 30 day free trial. If you opt for the free version you can create how many invoices are necessary for two projects. The costs for the paid versions vary from 6$ (for unlimited invoices and 3 projects) to 140$ monthly that allows you to manage 10,000 projects and how many invoices you need.
Xero is perfect for small business. For 29$ per month you can manage contacts and invoices, track expenses and so on.
Worketc. can offer you a great variety of management tools. Using it, you can manage your time and sales. It also offers you billing and reporting features, and much more. The costs are not high: a user can take all the advantages offered by this service for only 29, 95$ per month. Of course, if there are many users, we can talk about additional costs.
Invo Track is what you need if you are looking for a simple solution to create and keep an evidence of your invoices. If this is all you need then this is the choice. You can opt for the free trial that allows you to send 2 invoices and to manage 2 clients per month. But for 9$ per month you can manage an unlimited number of clients.
Bill My Clients comes with a large variety of services. It can help you to manage your invoice or bills. It also offers you other additional services like graphs or maps, e-mail and phone support, and much more. You can opt to pay 11, 95$ per month or to pay per invoice.
Little Accounting is a very simple invoice solution that offers only the features you really need. You can manage up to 5 invoices per month for an unlimited number of clients. If you want more complicated plans then you have to pay a monthly fee. The costs differ from 8$ per month to 50$.
There are other 5 online financial services that I would recommend you: Billing Orchard, Time 59 Zoho Invoice, Bill 4 Time and QuickBooks Online. Anyway, I think that now it is easier for you to make up your mind and choose one of them. However, don’t forget: first of all, determine what your needs are and make the choice accordingly. Trying some free trials seems to be a good idea.
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October 29th, 2010 at 8:12 am
Great article. this site is great lots of good info