FreshBooks vs QuickBooks Solopreneur: Which is a better fit?

Andrew T.: Hi, my name is Andrew. I'm the Chief Executive Officer at ATS Group. I give FreshBooks a rating of four. All right, so we used quite a lot of different softwares, FreshBooks being one of those softwares. Before we moved to FreshBooks, we were using a software known as Ways. We moved to FreshBooks because FreshBooks was designed to be for clients who want to do their own bookkeeping with us. Just providing them with guidance on doing so. It was more ideal for those kind of clients. FreshBooks is a pretty easy software to use. That's one of the reasons why we decided to use it for our clients who wanted to do their own bookkeeping. It's a very simple, very user-friendly. It allows for our clients to be able to do their books with little or no assistance from us, and it's quite ideal for entrepreneurs or business owners that wish to do their own accounting. Plus, they get very great support from the FreshBooks team. The process to get started using with FreshBooks was pretty simple. First of all, we were contacted by one of the reps at FreshBooks. They gave us a tutorial on the product, how it's used, the benefits of the product, and things like that. And then they guided us in setting up the product and they offer a lot of training. Their portal provides you with ongoing training and ongoing support. So the setup and use of the FreshBooks was quite easy and simple. So my advice to anybody looking for any new software, FreshBooks, or any other software out there is first of all, do your research. Read reviews such as this one right now so you can compare. Not every software is ideal for everyone, so what's ideal for me may not necessarily ideal for you, but once you compare the software, see what they offer, know the advantages, disadvantages, the pros and the cons, and that's one of the most important things to do. Then of course, all of these companies, FreshBooks included, normally give you a trial period. So you can actually try the software out. So you can do a test run and you can do side-by-side trials. So you can be using FreshBooks on one side, another accounting software on the other side. Compare both of them to see which one works best for you. And then after that you can go ahead and make a decision as to which one you want to move forward with.

Justin L.: Hi, my name is Justin. I'm a small business owner and I rate QuickBooks Self-Employed four out of five. And if you like reviews like this, click the link below. So I used to use Microsoft Excel for all of my accounting, and the reason why it didn't work for me was because it wasn't really intuitive. There was not really any way to import my credit card or debit card information, and it didn't track my expenses automatically. So that's why I decided to switch to QuickBooks Self-Employed. The reason why I chose QuickBooks Self-Employed is because I'm a small business owner and I do e-commerce, and I use eBay and Etsy, and I do a lot of micro transactions. So for every time I ship out an item, it hits my bank account, and essentially I would have to categorize whether it's a business expense or even deeper, a shipping expense or a meal expense. So I actually really liked the fact that I could go deep with it and extrapolate the information that I needed pretty much automatically. So that's what I liked about QuickBooks Self-Employed primarily. Getting started in QuickBooks was overall pretty simple. It just asked for basically your bank account information, debit card and credit card information to basically import the financial account and information. And I had a little trouble with certain credit cards, such as Home Depot, which kind of tripped me up a little bit, but for the most part, it took all of my financial information and it imported pretty much everything easily and quickly. So getting started was pretty easy for me. If you're just getting started in QuickBooks, I would suggest don't get caught up in the mile section. It has a mile tracker, which is actually really accurate and really good, but it actually really tracks everywhere you go. And if you're kind of into privacy, I wouldn't recommend it. And then also it's just way simpler not to even deal with mileage. Because initially I thought, well, I should track all my mileage and write it off. But it's just way too much work. It's way simpler to just get the basic deduction and not deal with the mileage and get to the meat and potatoes of QuickBooks, which is really the transactions and diving in. Oh, also making sure that the categories and the tags are accurate. I really screwed up when I basically started with QuickBooks because I had three businesses that I was basically running out of one QuickBooks account. So if you're kind of crazy like me and wanted to do a lot of different things, you got to make sure that you categorize things properly and that you tag things properly because that is really what makes a huge difference. When you run the reports and you do the profit and loss statement, that is what I would recommend that you kind of focus on and you'll get yourself up and running pretty quickly once you import your data. And it's a really powerful tool. You got a lot of great reports. As long as you accurately put in your information, you can sort it pretty easily.