FreshBooks is pretty cool

I just sent out my first invoice via FreshBooks, an online time tracking and billing tool that a colleague recommended to me earlier. So far, I really like it! I'm impressed that it's an ad-free service that seems to make all its money by selling you things around the fringes, like the ability to accept online payments or send out invoice hardcopies via postal mail, while keeping all its core features free of charge. Same colleague suggested that it starts charging when you add a number of active clients beyond a certain limit, but if so, I haven't hit that yet. [Update: OK, I found it. It's free so long as you manage three or fewer clients with it, and then they require you buy into a monthly subscription.]

When I first went independent last year, my time-tracking system involved the clock on the wall and a text file full of date-grouped clusters of stop/start times, and my billing system was just rote re-use of the invoice template that ships with the Pages word processor. After a few months, I switched to using SlimTimer, a minimal-but-functional AJAX-based time tracker, which served me well for about half a year. The monthly, manual translations of lists of labeled time chunks into invoice tables was still a pain, though.

FreshBooks's timer, I have discovered, is at least as nice as SlimTimer's, and it's very easy to dump the information that it collects into nice-looking invoices, which it can then go ahead and mail to your clients for you. I am likely to stick with FreshBooks for a while.