FreshBooks vs. Sage Accounting

FreshBooks is the perfect tool for businesses who have hundreds of clients and customers whom they invoice regularly. It removes the need to manually send invoices to clients and customers, by streamlining inputted information to create an automated invoicing system which keeps clients and customers up to date with their bills. It is also a great tool for managing expenses, especially for companies with different teams working on varying projects, ensuring these teams do not exceed the budget ceiling.

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Pastel also helps users to save time when it comes to bank and supplier reconciliations. Capturing into pastel is also easy. The merit of pastel is that it is very efficient and simplifies most of the financial accounting and human resource management tasks. I have discovered that some long batches (more than 2000), if posted during peak hours, tend to fail during posting and resume later, but at this point, doubling, trebling, or even quadrupling transactions.

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• FreshBooks is pretty intuitive to use. I did have some questions when I first started using the system, but it wasn't a long learning curve.
• FreshBooks provides more capability than other billing applications such as PaySimple or BlinkSale. FreshBooks does provide an easy invoicing function. It's easy to create invoices that can be sent via email or snail mail to one or more individuals (for example, the decision-maker and the accounting dept). Clients can pay online or send a check and then I note that the payment has been received. If paid by credit card, the system automatically marks the invoice paid. Your business accounts such as bank accounts can be linked to FreshBooks. Then, the system can automatically draw in expenses and will create simple P&L reports, overdue invoices, client history, etc. If you don't have inventory and complex payroll, etc. FreshBooks provides just the right level of capability to make financial tracking simple.
• FreshBooks integrates with a number of credit card companies. I use Stripe, which has fees similar to Paypal, but much more reliable processing. I can accept all credit cards, including American Express, for a reasonable fee.

• Bank integration - being able to extract banking transaction into Sage Accounting.
• Allocation rules - transactions are auto-allocated once allocation rules have been set up. This is a great time-saver.
• Flexibility - the ability to view transactions, click on them to the allocation point and rectifying if required saves having to create journals, and therefore time. General ledgers therefore stay cleaner and more user-friendly.

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• Pricing structure is very poor for us. $10/user per month when we have staff that comes and goes. And it's impossible to change a free contractor to a paid staff and vice-versa. This is my biggest complaint.
• They only allow one admin owner user. Emails must come from that account. This is annoying, as other staff cannot log in with the same power.
• The user interface is quite dated. I've made recommendations to improve it and all have been ignored. It's skinny and not fluid. Also, there is no way to link between invoices and clients.

• I find it difficult to record journals in cloud accounting. Maybe I just don’t have the knowledge.
• It’s important to export all unrecorded sync bank transactions to Excel to send to clients to explain the payment receipts before being posted. This function is not available on the cloud and makes life harder, having to call out the transactions to clients over the phone.

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At the current needs of our business, FreshBooks suits us perfectly - it allows online access by our accountant to the system for GST purposes, easy input of expenses and tracking of Profit and Loss statements. FreshBooks customer service is great as well - very understanding and accommodating.

I could not live without Sage Accounting, it has become an integral part of my everyday. The more I have used Sage Accounting the more I have fallen in love with it. I am excited to be part of this ever-evolving accounting system that has grown from strength to strength, making life easier is something Sage does so well.

It is well-built software with no significant drawbacks. It offers all the necessary futures expected from online software. However, it is not yet up there with Xero and QuickBooks regarding connections with other software and advanced reporting features. The developers work closely with accountants, and therefore, I expect further development of the software.

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Sage Accounting is built for the business owner/user and not the accountant, it therefore guides the user and thus detailed accounting knowledge and experience is not a necessarily a prerequisite . It offers a monthly price and therefore no significant up front spend and it tailorable to your business with useful dashboards that again you can tailor to instantly see what's important to you.

FreshBooks is easy to use and always works!

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Sage has been always available when I want it. If there is any maintenance work to be done by the Sage team, you are told well in advance. Maintenance is generally carried out late at night or before the day begins for most of us. It continues to be the most reliable software I use.

Performance is top notch, if it is not, it is probably your wi-fi connection. It has happened that pages load slowly because of an error on Sage side but almost never. Overall reports load fine, the site is fast, navigation is fine. I have a client that has so many invoices, it is slow or gets stuck when you try to load a report for a whole year but it is just too many invoices, it makes sense. Just take 2 report for 6 months and combine them, its not an issue for me. I am happy with Sage Accounting's performance.

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I think the support level for FreshBooks is on par with a 6 because the folks behind this application do a fairly good job at providing support for their customer base. I still don't think they are at an elite level when it comes to supporting but are getting there although too slow in my opinion.

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The support is world class - never ever during 30 plus years in business I have received such helpful, knowledgeable and genuine support as I have from Sage. At Sage people matter and i can chat to someone safe in the knowledge that they will actually listen and assist. This also backed up by huge online portfolio of help and resources

Staff are always friendly, and patient, always work at a speed that suits you. You are never rushed, and In only a short time they seem to be able to help you make great strides. It has been a pleasure not a chore, learning how SAGE Accounting works and benefits me and the company.

I find the online training was very informative and they answered all my questions. I am also certified in Sage One and provided online training in the program which I have set up several people on and they love how it keeps them organized.

I haven't changed my mind since my first evaluation. Freshbooks is still meeting my needs, easy to use, etc.

The clients' business owner worked with Sage on implementation before I began working for them. After consultation with them it is clear the process was quickly performed and without complication. The key takeaway was that Sage is seen as a partner to the business. That said, it was always necessary to engage with an accountant such as myself to extract the best out of the software.

There is no fluff and feature overload with FreshBooks. I can get to what I need quickly and easily. I don't have to deal with unnecessary features and fields the system considers essential. The payment features are streamlined and have lots of flexibility when receiving payments. I love FreshBooks support, and it is 100 more customer-friendly and easier to work with than its primary competitors from my experience.

Incentivized

The first integration we had created for our product was with QuickBooks Online. There was a fair amount of work put in to create this solution, and a huge amount of testing to make sure it works properly. Once Sage Accounting had an API available for integration, we included this as well, as a fair number of our customers use Sage products. While there were challenges coming from the difference between product APIs, Sage Accounting was overall easier to implement, and more straightforward with actions and expected outcomes.

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You can use Sage in your company for various aspects/positions such as bookkeepers, invoicing clerks, accountant, purchasing etc. Everyone can have their own user login and permissions can be set that specific people can do specific jobs without being able to access other peoples progress or accounts of the company.

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• Since implementing FreshBrooks, 80% of invoices created are paid in less than 30 days from the time the invoice is sent via email to the client. Prior to FreshBooks, we were mailing or hand-delivering our invoices and payment on those invoices was in the 45-90 day range.
• Time tracking is done directly in FreshBooks (or through a plugin that's connected directly to FreshBooks) and is very easy to use. With this feature we're much better able to track all business activities. This has helped us to quantify the time we're spending on non-billable business-related work in addition to our billable client hours. We've been able to adjust our pricing accordingly, as well as being more efficient with our non-billable activities.
• When FreshBooks online payments is set-up in your account, payments made with this method are automatically sent to your bank account. We choose between FreshBooks payments and PayPal payments in order to manage how much money stays in the PayPal account for online expenses vs. how much is transferred directly to the bank account.

• Being cloud-based, meaning I can work from anywhere, has had a massive ROI, as I am no longer tied to the office.
• CoPilot has meant we can spend more hours creating work for our business than chasing for payments.
• Statement Runs mean we do not have to spend half a day carrying out the tasks individually.

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