Online invoicing system for a web design & hosting company – from time-wasting pain to absolute pleasure.

Why we use Fresh Books

As a small creative solutions business specializing in web design, website development, hosting and graphic design – bookkeeping is not on top of our priority list. Although we really do like all of our affairs to be in order, we simply don’t have the time to concentrate all of our energy in this area.

When the time came around for our monthly invoicing it was both a happy & frustrating time. Happy in the sense that we were sending out invoices so we could get paid. Frustrating in the sense that it took several hours to generate invoices for clients, most of which were for very small amounts.

As if this waste of time wasn’t bad enough, sometimes we made mistakes. Since everything was done manually – human error was inevitable and common. On a few occasions clients received invoices meant for other clients and sometimes we forgot to add things to invoices. We lost a lot of money this way.

Another frustration for us was that sometimes clients forgot to pay and until we realized we had no cash to flow, we would be oblivious. Once the realization hit, we would have to manually draft emails (which felt awkward) asking our clients for payment. Sometimes we would have to resend these emails – if we remembered. Keeping tabs of who paid was also a chore…

… Until one day a little ad caught my eye, there it was “Fresh Books – online invoicing made simple.”

I signed up for a free account and set up my profile. I uploaded my logo and customized a few settings. Then I forgot about it. And when I did remember Fresh Books, I thought that it was going to be a task moving my whole way of doing things to their system. I guess my paradigm was in the place of knowing that my system kind of worked for me but this new way might not gel too well.

I carried on painfully sending out manually generated Excel & PDF invoices for a few months until I had absolutely had enough. I made a decision to actually shift my old paradigm and to give Fresh Books a proper try.

I was so serious that I purchased a paid plan. I uploaded all of my clients via a bulk import from a csv file. Exporting this from Excel was a breeze – importing to Fresh Books was just as simple. I setup access details for all and customized my invoice template. The last invoice number I used was inserted as my first invoice number on Fresh Books and away it went. The first invoice was a success!

Doing a bit of exploring I realized that I could set up auto recurring invoices – “wow this is cool,” I thought. What a neat feature since most of the small amounts we invoiced out where recurring fees for website hosting. I setup all of our hosting clients on recurring profiles and forgot about invoicing them again – it all happened automatically from then on.

“What about clients who don’t pay?” Well my question was soon answered with an automatic reminder facility. This feature allows me to set up to three email reminders. All of the text is customizable within the email subject and body. I could also space the reminders to go out on any given number of days from the time of invoice. From now on reminders were all automatic – very, very cool.

Once clients received their invoice notification via email and logged into Fresh Books, I was able to see that they had viewed the invoice. As soon as I received payment notification, I simply marked their invoice as paid and again they received an email message thanking them – all automated!

At a glance I am able to see what we have invoiced for the month, what has been paid and what is still outstanding. There are numerous other reports that can be generated. The Fresh Books system is truly a pleasure to use and I can’t imagine ever going back to my old way of doing things. Fresh Books has saved me valuable hours every month, not to mention the effort.

Check out how Fresh Books can help your business now!