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.

Obviously, you will grade your quality of experience with these suppliers largely in terms of the reliability of service that they provide. But these days most reasonable suppliers offer very similar levels of reliability, so what becomes more and more important is the quality of their customer service. All services will encounter a problem every now and then; the true mark of a great company is how they address those problems, how quickly they respond to your support requests and questions.

After dealing with literally hundreds of companies with stunningly crap customer support, when I find one where the people are helpful, quick to respond and knowledgeable about what they do, I hang onto them pretty tight and recommend them to as many people as possible. So I thought I would recommend a couple of companies that I have dealt with a lot recently and have found to provide both excellent reliability and fantastic customer support.

Wired Tree (Hosting)

Wired Tree offer managed VPS as well as dedicated servers, with cPanel/WHM at reasonable prices. I host all my personal sites with them, and we use them at work now for all our clients’ hosting, and they have performed excellently in terms of speed and uptime. More importantly, their customer service has really been second to none – support requests are generally answered within 15 to 30 minutes, and they are knowledgeable, honest and exceedingly helpful. Highly recommended, check them out at wiredtree.com.

Campaign Monitor (Email broadcasts)

These guys are great! They provide a really nice, easy to use online email broadcast tool, which does it’s job very well. They also are quick to respond to support tickets and information requests, and are eager to help and quick to look into any problems that I have encountered (mostly my fault!). After using an number of other email broadcast tool suppliers over the years I can honestly say that none have even come close to the level of service that these guys offer. You can sign up for an account at campaignmonitor.com for free to check out the tool.

Any one got any other great companies they can recommend?