This blog post is inspired by an idea that Grace, a Freshbooks employee, had. She reached out to me via email, and told me she had an idea for a blog post about how Freshbooks affected my work as a freelance writer thus far. I’ve received some emails that are somewhat similar in the past, and I typically ignore them but my experience thus far with Freshbooks has been genuinely positive.
When I went from writing the occasional article, to still writing the occasional article, while working with businesses that wanted to hire me as an independent contractor, that did the web writing work they don’t have the time and/or skills I knew what I was doing, and was great at it, but there were tiny little things like writing invoices, getting paid electronically, rather than via old fashioned methods such as direct deposit, cheques, etc. , and claiming freelance income during tax time, that I had to learn on my feet, through either getting help from others, or self-teaching myself. My first experiences with tracking my hours, and writing invoices lead to a brief experimentation with Freshbooks. Fun fact: the first invoice I ever sent was via Freshbooks.
I’m terrible at math, and genuinely believe that I’m so terrible at it that if I lived in a “pre-calculator” and “pre cellphones with calculator and tipping aps” age I’d spend so much time being extremely lost, whenever I had to tip someone, or do basic math on the spot. I loved Freshbooks because it did all the numerical work for me. All it needed was basic info like rate per project, total hours, names, and contact info, and then I’d have extremely accurate answers at my fingertips.
Anyone that either knows someone who freelances, or actually freelances knows that the first couple of months are often challenging because no matter how much luck you’re having at getting work, you’re still working on building up a good enough quota of clients to make it all relatively stable and let’s face it, your boss, well you, since you are your own boss anyways, is only just starting to figure out how to get from point A to B. Freshbooks was a reliable system, during those first couple of months, that helped keep track of the money side of things, in order to make the new reality, of doing whatever I could, to make my business grow, a lot less overwhelming.
I eventually cancelled my Freshbooks subscription, in order to save money on unrelated expenses but despite the cost I was genuinely a satisfied customer. Freshbooks taught me how to write a professional, clear, concise invoice, and bill my clients, and that’s something that I’m eternally grateful for.
