Karl Katzke

For my consulting business, I’ve switched from SideJobTrack (which hasn’t been updated/bugfixed in six months…) to Freshbooks … Freshbooks is tons better from an invoicing and payment point of view, and there some features I love, but I have a few minor beefs with their time clock system.

Features I love:

* The calendar that shows how much time you spent on projects in a day.
* The ability to mark time as billable or non billable by task.
* The ability to have clients log in.
* The payment gateway integration and the ability to set up recurring billing.
* The support ticket system is nice to keep a to-do list in.

Features I wish for:

* I wish I could get a report that would give me a month to date what my unbilled hours are in dollars. I charge different rates for different customers or services sometimes.
* I wish I could itemize my invoices based on my notes. I like to tell my client what I did during that 5 hour block of time I billed them for. (This actually is pretty essential for me, and I hope it doesn’t mean a lot of copying and pasting come invoice time. You’ve got 15 days to fix it, Freshbooks…)
* I wish I could add time to the time clock. I often don’t make it into freshbooks until I’ve already been talking to a client for a few minutes, and I have a hard time remembering to add time in at the end. For instance, I talk to a client for 5 minutes, then realize this will be a long conversation and go log into freshbooks and start the clock. I’d really like to be able to start the clock at 5 minutes (in MINUTES) as opposed to having to remember to convert the 5 minutes to decimal at the end and add it in.
* I’d like to be able to analyze my cost/income for certain jobs. I.e. it costs me $500 to buy the software license, $1000 to buy the hardware, and I pass those costs through but that’s $1500 I need to *mentally* take off of the bottom line … whereas if I had costing on those items, I’d see the cost show up in my income reports.

Overall, I’m happier to have someone who’s built a compay around their app supporting my business as opposed to the one-off SideJobTrack that ArtyPapers did… I didn’t feel like my information was ’safe’ there. But Freshbooks is by no means done… those are all what I would deem ‘critical’ features.