As an independent contractor trying to juggle multiple clients and projects, I know firsthand how challenging it can be to keep your finances straight while still delivering excellent service. Between creating professional invoices, tracking your time across different jobs, managing expenses, and communicating with clients, administrative tasks can quickly become an overwhelming burden that suffocates your productivity.
Fortunately, cloud-based accounting software FreshBooks provides purpose-built solutions that address these common pain points for contractors and freelancers. With intuitive features tailored for the workflow of independent businesses, FreshBooks allows you to simplify your finances, work more efficiently, and unlock your full potential.
In this comprehensive guide for contractors, we’ll explore the core features of FreshBooks and how they can benefit your independent business across critical areas like invoicing, time tracking, expense management, project collaboration, and tax filing.
Challenges Faced By Independent Contractors
Before diving into FreshBooks’ offerings, it’s helpful to understand the most common struggles contractors and freelance workers face trying to manage the financial and administrative aspects of running their businesses.
Juggling Multiple Responsibilities
When you’re independent, you must be a jack of all trades – finding clients, selling your services, completing client projects, tracking your finances, following up on payments owed, and more. With so many responsibilities to juggle, it’s easy to have the non-revenue-generating tasks fall through the cracks even though they are vital to getting paid for your hard work.
This balancing act between completing billable projects and managing your back-office finances is a constant challenge. Administrative work can become frustrating and massively time-consuming without suitable systems in place.
Tracking Finances Across Projects
Unlike traditional employees earning a steady paycheck, your income as a contractor comes from various clients and projects, making tracking your finances far more complex. Expenses and billable hours must be accurately tracked and assigned to the appropriate client or job.
With information scattered across different spreadsheets, notebooks, or accounting tools, getting a clear picture of your overall profitability on a client-by-client basis can be nearly impossible. Making intelligent business decisions requires financial transparency, which most independent workers lack.
Communicating with Clients
Clear and regular communication is vital when managing projects and expectations for clients. However, constantly emailing back and forth or playing “phone tag” is tedious and inefficient. Sharing documents through unorganized email chains leads to version control issues.
Without standardized systems, mismatched expectations and miscommunication can easily happen, leading to clients being inadvertently left in the dark. Customer relationships from poor communication and disorganization threaten your reputation and long-term success.
Staying Organized and Efficient
There are only so many hours in a day. Time is an independent contractor’s most precious resource, and maximizing your billable hours is essential. Yet, between chasing payments, reconciling project expenses, creating invoices, and fielding client questions, your days can quickly get eaten up by administrative, non-billable tasks.
Staying on track with financial management while delivering projects promptly requires strong organizational skills and efficient systems. Lacking those disciplined systems will torpedo your productivity and profitability as a freelancer. The mission-critical task is to create order amidst the chaos.
FreshBooks Solutions For Contractors
Purpose-built for the needs of small service businesses, FreshBooks provides an integrated accounting solution addressing these core pain points – from streamlined invoicing to organized expense tracking to transparent client reporting. Their suite of features automates administrative tasks, eliminates double-entry bookkeeping, and provides the visibility independent contractors need to run their businesses effectively.
Let’s explore the key functionality empowering contractors to work more productively while getting paid faster.
Effortless Invoicing and Online Payments
For service providers like contractors and freelancers, invoicing is the lifeblood of your business. Getting paid for your hard work hinges on creating professional invoices and ensuring clients pay them on time. FreshBooks’ flexible invoicing system removes headaches by automating payment collection.
Customizable Invoices and Estimates
FreshBooks offers beautiful, customizable invoice and estimate templates that reflect your personal branding so you look polished and professional to clients. Built-in features allow you to tailor invoice terms, set project milestones, and specify deposits or retainers as needed.
Creating detailed line items tied to specific projects has always been challenging, whether billing hourly, project-based, or using flat rate fees. Quickly customize and send your invoices with just a few clicks.
Payment Tracking and Reminders
Waiting 30, 60, or 90 days for clients to pay invoices hurts cash flow and profitability. FreshBooks’ payment tracking makes it easy to monitor unpaid invoices so you know who always owes you money.
Their automated reminder system sends customized dunning messages when invoices become overdue, so you avoid awkward payment conversations with clients.
Accept Credit Cards and ACH
Chasing clients by email or over the phone demanding payment is annoying for everyone involved and often ineffective. Integrated credit card and ACH processing with FreshBooks enables you to deliver invoices and collect payment from clients immediately without the hassle. They securely store sensitive payment data so you maintain PCI compliance.
No more waiting 30 days just to get paid. FreshBooks empowers you to run an on-demand payment model for seamless cash flow.
Streamlined Time Tracking
For contractors billing clients by the hour, like freelance writers or web developers, accurately tracking how much time you spend on projects is imperative for getting paid fairly. Detailed timesheets justify your rates to clients, provide essential documentation for taxes, and give you clear data to decide pricing and profitability.
FreshBooks offers robust tools to log hours and generate timesheets without hassle or errors.
Project Timers and Timesheets
Starting timers as you begin working is effortless, whether on desktop or mobile. Tagging time to specific projects happens on the fly within FreshBooks as you work. Detailed timesheet reports can be run, exported, and sent to clients, clearly showing billable hours with a click—no more fighting with spreadsheets.
Integrated Payroll Management
Running payroll for yourself or a small team has always been challenging. FreshBooks lets you set hourly employee rates and track time worked, calculate necessary deductions, and cut direct deposit paychecks accordingly. Seamless integration means payroll ties directly to client invoices, clarifying profit per project.
Bill Clients Accurately
With detailed data on billable hours logged against assigned projects and client accounts, FreshBooks’ transparent tracking ensures you never lose billable time again. Both you and your clients gain clear insight into exactly how hours were spent to back up your invoices, which reduces payment delays from billing disputes. Accurate time data gives you pricing power.
Organized Expense Management
As a contractor, you incur various business expenses – equipment, software, travel costs, continuing education, professional dues, etc. Tracking these tax-deductible expenses across multiple projects can become challenging as receipts pile up. FreshBooks centralizes the capture and categorization of these crucial business expenses.
Receipt Tracking
Simply snap photos of every receipt from your phone as expenses happen. FreshBooks offers mobile receipt capture, making it easy to upload images of all paper and electronic receipts to the right project or category. Storing images digitally means no more frantic searches for lost paper receipts when tax time hits.
Tax Deduction Management
Validating business deductions with clean documentation is critical during tax preparation. FreshBooks organizes all captured receipts, transaction logs, bank imports, and credit card data for easy year-end exporting to avoid costly tax audit headaches. Better yet, you can delegate expense categorization to bookkeepers while still accessing essential financial tracking.
Categorize Spending
Clear visibility into where you spend money across client projects, contractors, equipment purchases, or general overhead provides crucial insights to make your business more profitable. Easily create expense categories that match your workflow, then tag expenses as they happen.
Smarter budgeting and spending decisions start with better expense data, which FreshBooks delivers.
Project Management and Communication
Juggling multiple clients with various milestones and deadlines becomes exponentially harder as a solo contractor than having a coordinated team. FreshBooks’ centralized Project hub connects the key elements for streamlined client management – from proposals to task lists to file sharing and invoicing.
Centralized Client Portal
A dedicated workspace for each client ties together every component related to that project. Quickly access project details, associated invoices and expenses, milestone checklists, and file repositories without digging through cluttered inboxes and scattered drives—finally, a simplified way to track project health for yourself and your clients.
File Sharing and Milestones
Client portals make collaborating seamless by allowing the upload and sharing of files associated with milestones and deliverables. Say goodbye to emailing endless versions of documents back and forth for review and approval. Quick previews ensure you send the right files every time.
Task Lists and Notifications
Interactive to-do lists centralized in the client portal enable you to map out deliverables, assign due dates, set reminders, and check off tasks as completed. Both you and client collaborators get automated notifications and updates as milestones are reached so everyone stays aligned. Real-time transparency and communication via FreshBooks facilitate better working relationships.
Automation and Integrations
As a solo contractor or microbusiness owner, you have to optimize every system and process to maximize efficiency. FreshBooks enables you to automate the mundane administrative tasks that hold back productivity. Seamless integrations with other popular business apps open up infinite possibilities.
Automated Invoicing Workflows
One of the biggest game changers is automatically creating and scheduling recurring invoices for repeat clients on fixed schedules. Preset payment reminders go out when invoices are nearing their due date or become past due, so you no longer have to remember to follow up manually.
Work less while getting paid more with automated accounts receivable workflows. Custom late fees and thank you messages further personalize the experience.
Zapier and Other Integrations
FreshBooks plays nicely with other apps through robust integrations so you can connect the solutions you already rely on. Zapier support enables tying FreshBooks workflows to over 2,000 other web apps. Native integrations exist with G Suite, Gusto, MailChimp, Slack, Stripe, HubSpot, and more.
Switching costs vanish when your essential tools talk to each other seamlessly. Don’t choose between the apps you love – use them together with FreshBooks at the center to supercharge your productivity.
Custom Solutions
Fully customize and tailor how FreshBooks works for you using the Development Platform options for contractors with more technical capabilities. Employ Javascript, CSS, webhooks, and API capabilities to build the exact workflows and experiences you want, from invoice design to reporting needs.
Take total control over scaling your unique business model and brand with boundless potential for workflow personalization unlocked by FreshBooks through code customizations.
Start Simplifying Your Business Today
Suppose the headaches and hiccups from financial paperwork slow you down as an independent contractor or freelancer. In that case, FreshBooks provides purpose-built solutions, allowing you to regain focus on your passion – delighting clients with exceptional work.
Simplified time tracking, streamlined invoicing, organized expenses, transparent project management, and easy-to-use mobile functionality are game changers for your productivity and profitability through smarter financial workflows.
Sign Up for a Free Trial
See for yourself! FreshBooks offers a worry-free 30-day free trial to explore the entire suite. Set up invoices, track project hours, manage expenses, run test payroll cycles, customize reports – experience the full functionality firsthand without obligation.
Choose the Right Plan
FreshBooks scales to meet your business needs today and expands as you grow, so you only pay for tools currently creating value. Most contractors succeed with the Plus plan, but special discounted offerings for high-volume users are available. Don’t hesitate to contact their award-winning customer support team to identify the best fit.
Leverage Resources and Support
Between live chat, email support, phone assistance, and an extensive library of guides, FreshBooks provides stellar around-the-clock help getting the most from the platform. Take advantage of webinars, videos, and community forums to expand your skills on your schedule. You’re never alone – FreshBooks customer support has your back!
