Software for Startups - FreeAgent
This is the first in a series of articles describing the support system of products we swear by at Gameplan. If a product is in this series, we can vouch for its awesomeness. I spent much of last year running a solo web-design firm, with some help and co-operation from another couple of local designers.
One of the things that used to be a massive hassle was cashflow: estimating, invoicing and tracking what money was coming in and out. I started out manually creating and tracking sent invoices and estimates, but this was a massive 'extra headache' - who was I waiting on for approval or payment and what was I spending?
As a side note I even hand created templates thinking that a designer should have 'nice looking invoices', which was a big waste of time - don't do this, put your logo on a simple invoice and send it out. Invoices are for getting paid not proving how talented you are, save your creative effort for the project at hand!
I dabbled with a couple of 'on laptop' systems but was concerned about the single point of failure, plus the various solutions didn't seem to capture the 'what am I spending' part of my financial story.
Enter FreeAgent.
FreeAgent literally saved hours of time and headaches. It deals with the invoicing and estimating process and time recording in a straightforward way. In addition you also get useful graphs and charting of your business incomings and outgoings.
The most useful thing was tracking my outstanding invoices when running multiple concurrent projects, When you import your bank statements the invoices and payments are all automatically synced and marked as paid. This year they even added automatic reminders so the system can remind clients for you. Brilliant.
Being UK-based they interface well with the downloadable formats from the UK banks, but I emailed them a sample of DBS's awful CSV download and they added compatibility. That's what I call service! And they've done it again for another Singapore person. And when you import your CSVs it remembers payees, so the more you use it the better it gets.
While the last few months has mainly seen money leaving the business (a trend we hope to reverse soon!) I've still used FreeAgent to track our spending and do a couple of estimates for consulting work. When we kick in with receiving payment via PayPal, FreeAgent will link up with that too and track our incoming funds - super-awesome.
For me FreeAgent is better than the competitors because it treads the line between too complex and too simple and ends up hitting the sweet spot of doing everything we need and then getting out of the way.
I've since eulogized FreeAgent to a couple of people and everyone I've referred has been extraordinarily happy with it. Plus they seem like a bloody good gang of people solving a problem, hopefully like we are, so supporting them makes me feel good.
Why not give FreeAgent a try? If you use any of the links in this article you'll get 10% off (and so do I) and there's a 30-day trial... so double win right?
