I (heart) FreeAgent

It’s a bit of a mission of mine to always try and spread the word to other people about great products or services that I come across. I think it is really important that the users of these products and services help to promote them – as more often than not they are smaller companies without trillion-dollar marketing budgets to spend on flashy ad campaigns and endorsements.

One such quality service that I have been using recently is FreeAgent. It’s basically an online accounting web app for freelancers and small businesses, and I’ve been very impressed with both the product itself and the people behind it.

I started using it about nine months or so ago to track the odd bits of on-the-side work I was doing whilst employed at my last job, and now that I am freelancing ‘proper’ I’ve been getting a bit deeper into it. It’s straightforward, easy-to-use and it has really changed the way I look at my personal book-keeping, making it much easier for me to track my finances, expenses, tax liabilities and so on.

I’m not going to go into detail on all the functionality here – instead I would urge you to go and try the demo and/or the 30 day free trial available over at their website to see if it would fit your needs. But for the vast majority of freelancers (especially UK based ones) and small businesses I think that it should cover pretty much all your bases as far as bookkeeping, invoicing and time tracking are concerned. And more importantly it does it in a straightforward, easy to use and understand manner: no Quickbooks-style crap here.

But no app stands up on merit alone these days – it’s the support and openness of the companies behind them that really makes a product great. And the guys and girls behind FreeAgent have very much impressed me here too! Updates to the app are well planned, users are well notified of any (rare) scheduled downtime, the staff are helpful and responsive on Get Satisfaction (which they use for their customer service enquiries) and active on Twitter – in fact yesterday, after I posted a tweet about how nice it would be to be able to more easily customise the CSS for invoices, they tweeted back to say that this functionaliy was actually a beta feature in testing, and they had enabled it for my account! Legendary.

So, go check it out, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed. And thanks to the magic of their referral system, if you do sign up and put in the code ‘31crg0ak’ (without the apostrophes!) or use this link to go there we’ll both get 10% off the monthly cost – another nice touch that is available to to all users (and which means if you refer 10 people you would get the service free!).

Great work, @freeagentapp.