Tools I Can't Live Without - (Part IV)

Where were you the last time you sent out invoices to your clients?

If you're like most business owners, you were seated in front of your very stationary PC (or Mac) and slavishly printing out invoices to mail them because your accounting software lives on that computer. Some of you were still stuck in front of the PC or Mac, but you were emailing them. A definite step up! A small but growing set of you were at the client's site, logged in to a web based accounting system from any computer there, and were generating an invoice on the spot. Your client received the email immediately. Sound pretty awesome?

I was fully prepared at this point to tell you all about QuickBooks Online. It has been with my company from the beginning (2003). Unfortunately, that means I cannot remember how easy it was to set up. But then, that was almost 7 years ago, and much has changed in the application - except for the simplicity. It's still very simple to use, and it can not have been horribly difficult to set up or I would remember the pain.

But you'll notice I said that I was fully prepared to tell you about QuickBooks Online.

One of the very neat things about doing any kind of advice styled blogging is that you are learning pretty much as you're typing. Well, if you're doing your homework, you're learning. And that's why this article changed from concept to execution.

It was fortuitous that I was going to be working on this blog post today. I had been listening to the Net@Night #143 podcast, detailing Expensify. During the course of the podcast, a web based accounting package called FreshBooks was mentioned as one of the accounting packages that Expensify works with. So I thought I would take a look and see how it stacked up against what I have been experiencing with QuickBooks.

The FreshBooks Tour is impressive, and gives you a peek into most of what you will want to do with the package. The most interesting bits that I saw here were parts that were being charged as extra items in QuickBooks - Things like time tracking and estimates. Noticeably missing were any tools for payroll... But there are references to third party offerings in the forums.

That slight omission aside, there are some amazing offerings in the "Add-Ons" area of the site. This is where openness between applications really starts to pay off. Want to have some deeper accounting capabilities? No problem, look at the Accounting section. Same with CRM, Lead Generation, and HelpDesk. All of these plugins tie together and share data across... so you can build a custom business application that just works. And it works from anywhere.

Don't get me wrong, QuickBooks online is not a bad choice. I've been a happy user for years, and it certainly beats having to go back to your office to do your billing. But the research for this blog post has got me looking at changing to something that will interact with other offerings - So that my HelpDesk software can see what I've billed my clients and what bills still need to be paid. And my CRM software can keep track of any invoices.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that it's healthy to review options periodically. It looks like I'm going to have a pretty good time setting up the various plugins for FreshBooks. Enjoy!