Today I’m writing this from two perspectives. As a longtime Freshbooks client, and as a fairly new Freshbooks partner.
I started my college life off as an accounting major. I worked for my dad’s CPA firm doing some accounting and taxes while going to school. My dad’s firm specialized at working with a lot of small business owners and their teams. Inside the firm…almost all of the accounting was done using stand alone versions of Quickbooks. The place was crawling with Quickbooks hard copy discs and tons of license numbers all over the place. I had the confusing but monumental task of trying to keep all of that software straight. It really stunk!
After a couple years of tax and accounting, I was completely disengaged. I couldn’t stand to look at debits and credits any longer. I didn’t want to do taxes or accounting as a career because I was completely obsessed with the tech/internet industry. So in the last couple years of college, rather than being miserable, I changed my major to Computer Information Systems and I started a technology company that eventually built an Application Service Provider or ASP.
We built this “ASP” in order to serve up the Quickbooks “stand-alone” application in the cloud so that both accountants and their clients could both access their data. We became an Intuit Solutions Provider and became married to Quickbooks. But…it was expensive for the client and less than ideal from a standpoint of speed and ease of access. I knew that… but didn’t really have another solution for clients at the time. I eventually went on to sell that tech company to invest in and start an internet marketing and software development company. I was now faced with the decision to choose which accounting platform I would use for this new venture. I thought to myself… “there’s got to be something better out there to handle the accounting for a small businesses than what we’ve been using.” This was a number of years ago before SaaS (Software as a Service) accounting was a well known or trusted.
So I did some Google searches and ran into Freshbooks. I looked into a couple different platforms but was attracted to the simplicity of Freshbooks. It was a “fresh” look on accounting and I didn’t have to go buy, install, upgrade or maintain any software on a device. I didn’t have to worry about updates. I didn’t have to worry about compatibility. It just worked! Everything was cloud based and it worked flawlessly for sending estimates, generating invoices, taking recurring payments, and many other accounting functions. I don’t think I’ve experienced any real bugs in the entire time I’ve been with Freshbooks. But when I did call them as a client, a live person answers the phone within one ring. The most important thing Freshbooks did for us was help us get paid much faster than we had been accustomed to in our previous business using stand alone software or even hosted software. It feels as if the software is built to help companies have less anxiety and more cash flow…which is something that I really needed. I’ve setup and run a Freshbooks account for three different startups with mind-blowing ease.
All of that was great and it made me want to keep using their product… but it was something else that turned me into a raving fan, lifelong user, and advocate of Freshbooks.
Their people! Their people are amazing. Seriously.
Over the many years I’ve been in business, I’ve noticed that when companies have great people, they normally have great products. Plain and simple. As we have recently become a Freshbooks integration partner for our team management and project collaboration software called Yalla, I’ve been able to see a little bit more about how the Freshbooks team works behind the scenes…and it’s been inspiring to see. It seems as if everyone in their organization are just cool people. Cool, smart, ready to help, and genuinely concerned about the clients and partners that they serve. For that reason, we’ve put more effort into building a seamless integration with their platform over the last few months than anything else.
We truly believe that Freshbooks is what they say they are… “The #1 cloud accounting software,” and that it will indeed make the lives of self-employed professionals and their teams much, much easier. Without a doubt we’ve witnessed it from every angle of their business.
On our end, as an integration partner, we believe that we’ve built the best Freshbooks integration on the market for people who would like to utilize a team management and project collaboration system. Our Yalla to Freshbooks integration brings the power of Freshbooks invoicing into Yalla so that you can keep and manage time against your clients in Yalla, and bill them directly out of Yalla. To learn a little more about this integration, you can visit our Freshbooks integration page.
If you’d like to learn more about Freshbooks, you can see how that works by watching the video below:
If you’d like to learn more about Yalla, check out our video below…