FreeAgent Central gets major update

The middle-ish of last week, Ed Molyneux, CEO FreeAgent Central and I had a call about what was then the upcoming release of a new version of FreeAgent. [Disclosure: I have a tiny stake in the company.] It’s a while since we’d spoken with each other. Things are going along well. Blevins Franks has understood the value proposition to the extent they’re prepared to talk about the new release. I want to go a little further, especially as it is some time since I took a good look at the service.

The top line stuff that caught my eye:

• A complete redesign which is a lot easier to follow and includes some new case study vignettes. These are always valuable. There’s now an accountant’s section so that people searching for a firm can see who is offering FreeAgent based services. There’s also a section for professionals who might be interested in seeing what’s on offer.
• A new work section for projects, time tracking and invoicing – where everything is integrated to make navigation a lot simpler and includes a timeslip control bar.
• Improved time sheet reporting – offering more choice in the way you record time
• A new My Money Section for Limited Company directors to manage expenses, dividends,salary, payroll

A few other things I’d not noticed in the past:

Scanned receipts: FreeAgent allows you to upload scanned expense receipts as attachments to your expense records. You can view these for individual expenses or download the original files again at any time.

Contact cards: allow you you to see all your clients and suppliers easily in one place, plus the current status of your active projects.

Tax timeline:  See live updates to your tax and company deadlines in your everyday calendar. Outlook, Google Calendar and Apple iCal all supported.

Case studies: more added and coming from an interesting spread of backgrounds.

Estimates/quotations are on the roadmap for release in the March timeframe and Ed said they are now moving to a 2-3 week update cycle rather than the weekly one that dominated development in 2008. That’s nothing to be alarmed about and makes for ‘digesting’ updates a little easier for end users.

Tagged as: freeagent central, Google Calendar, project management