FreshBooks

I have been using Freshbooks for years. This past year I had issues with my Freshbooks linking to my Credit Union account. After weeks of trying, Freshbooks still has not resolved the issue. As a result of their efforts, I was locked out of my bank account 6 times and had to call my bank to unlock my account each time. I am switching to Wave, and I realize there may be issues with their bank connection also, but at least Wave's software is free, so I will not be paying to manually import my expenses.

Freshbooks gets my clients to pay on time - I used to invoice people by sending pdfs via email and through regular mail and the problem was that people just didn't always pay. I myself am also guilty of that because you just stuff the invoice in a bin and then try to remember to pay it when you can. But with freshbooks, I probably get 10-20% of people to actually pay on time because when you send the invoice, there is an easy online method of paying via a credit card right there on the spot. Obviously I do lose that 1-3% using credit cards, but getting faster payments is more important than that percentage.

I had 4 accounts with FreshBooks. 2 paid, 2 on a free plan. Prices have repeatedly gone up, the featureset has shrunk (with that last big redesign), and stuff just breaks without notice (AMEX account sync stopped working for almost a year and I had to enter everything manually). On top of everything, they just up and took the free option away one day and I couldn't log into my 2 free accounts without setting up a paid plan. Find other options or risk losing access to your data unless you pay up. I can't access my transactions, my receipts, nothing. I could not discourage this platform enough... stay away.

I started my free trial and thought I could import the Customers/Vendors lists, then maybe try importing the journal and other stuff from QuickBooks, but even the simple things did not work. For example, I exported the Customers.xlsx from QuickBooks, converted it to CSV as FreshBooks wanted, and immediately ran into a problem. QuickBooks records customers' names as "First Last", and FreshBooks wants them separate, like "First" and "Last". Would I really need to go through and split those manually in the 21st century? I imagine how much more trouble it is to convert the more complex tables, and FreshBooks does not provide any means to migrate from QuickBooks. Later I found that there are companies that do the migration professionally, but I do not even know whether I would like FreshBooks or not. After it took several days for the FreshBooks support team to get back to me, I already made my mind - there is a reason I pay much more for QuickBooks.