Honestly, what I like best about FreshBooks is how straightforward it is to set up and hand off to our non-technical internal teams. I’m Lukas Ogod, Business Technology Specialist at Big Sky Digital Partners, and part of my job is testing, configuring, and rolling out tools like Xero, Zoho Expense, Dext, Moosend, Salesmate, Avaza, Odoo ERP, Swatle, Fairing, Survio, User Interviews, Surveybox, 5day.io, Centiment, and Leapfrog Geo for our 51–200 person information services team. A lot of these platforms have steep learning curves, but FreshBooks is different — I can get our project leads and account folks up and running without hours of training.
A recent example stands out. Last quarter, I needed a simple billing and time-tracking tool for our small client delivery group. We’d previously tried using Zoho Expense and Dext just to log billable hours and send quick invoices, but that combo got clunky fast. I spun up FreshBooks, built custom roles, locked down permissions so team members could only view their own project hours and client invoices, and had everything live in under an afternoon. Our project leads can log time against active client work, attach expenses they scan straight from their phones, and fire off invoices without waiting for me or finance to step in. That saved me from constant small support tickets every week.
The built-in time tracking tied directly to invoicing is my favorite feature. We run lots of short-term client projects, and before FreshBooks, people tracked hours in messy spreadsheets, then finance had to manually copy those numbers into billing records. It was error-prone and slow. One week, we almost sent a client an invoice with 18 extra billable hours because of a spreadsheet typo. Now, every time someone logs time in FreshBooks, it attaches right to the client record, and I can preview the invoice totals before they go out. It catches those silly human mistakes early.
I also appreciate the clean permission controls. Since I test so many tools including Odoo ERP and Avaza, I know how messy user access can get. In FreshBooks, I can create limited-view accounts for our delivery staff, admin access for finance, and keep full configuration rights locked for myself. I don’t need to dig through confusing menu layers just to adjust who can edit expenses or send invoices.
FreshBooks doesn’t have the deep accounting power of Xero, and it won’t replace heavier systems like Odoo ERP for our bigger operational workflows. But for fast, low-fuss time tracking and client invoicing for our service teams, it’s perfect. It cuts down my setup workload, reduces routine follow-up questions, and lets me spend more time evaluating other tools like Survio, User Interviews, Surveybox, and the rest of our stack instead of babysitting broken billing workflows. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
To be honest, FreshBooks falls short when we need deeper reporting and custom export flexibility, which I run into all the time at Big Sky Digital Partners. I’m Lukas, our Business Technology Specialist, and I regularly evaluate and manage our stack including Xero, Zoho Expense, Dext, Moosend, Salesmate, Avaza, Odoo ERP, Swatle, Fairing, Survio, User Interviews, Surveybox, 5day.io, Centiment and Leapfrog Geo. Most of these tools let me tweak report fields and build very specific CSV pulls, but FreshBooks is pretty restricted here.
A couple weeks back, our finance lead asked me to pull a combined report that grouped billable hours, reimbursable expenses, and invoice payment status by individual client project. FreshBooks has pre-built reports, but there’s no easy way to merge those datasets natively. I ended up running three separate exports: one for time entries, one for expenses, and one for invoices. Then I had to manually match rows in Excel for almost two hours. It was tedious, and we nearly mismatched expenses for one of our long-term clients before double-checking everything. That’s the kind of busywork I don’t hit with Xero or Odoo ERP.
I’m also not a fan of how limited its integration options are compared to other tools we use. We rely heavily on Zoho Expense and Dext for receipt capture and expense pre-processing. The native link between FreshBooks and Zoho Expense is basic at best. It only pushes over expense dollar amounts, not receipt attachments, expense categories or custom project tags we use internally. Our team will upload receipts into Zoho Expense, and those supporting documents never carry into FreshBooks. If finance needs to audit a charge, they still have to jump back over to Zoho Expense to hunt down the receipt. It breaks that single source of truth we try to build.
The permission setup has small frustrating gaps too. I’m used to the granular controls inside Avaza or Odoo ERP, where I can block specific users from seeing revenue totals. In FreshBooks, if I give someone access to view project invoices, they automatically see the full invoice amount. That’s tricky for our delivery leads. I want them to log time and check their own project status without seeing sensitive client revenue numbers, but FreshBooks doesn’t let me split those permissions cleanly. I either lock them out entirely or expose financial data I’d rather keep private. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.