Rightly or wrongly, I couldn't get my head round it. I daresay though it was more complex than I thought it would be, and too complex for a business like mine – a one-woman band selling services rather than products.

And one other thing that put me off was that there wasn't a facility to translate its US English terminology into UK English. Am I being too picky here?

M

I looked at Freshbooks. Then looked again. And went back again.

I just couldn't make their billing work for me (consulting firm that bills hourly and annual maintenance).

While they have a pretty neat iPhone application that integrates real time with their billing software – what really scared me away was:

1. There wasn't any easy way to bill ALL of my clients in one run. My conclusion was that billing clients one by one is a nifty feature that just doesn't scale. I can't imagine my administrator having to go through and bill each client one by one – and Freshbooks (at the time I reviewed it) had NO easy way to view unbilled work in process. It had a decidedly mom and pop kitchen table feel to it the more you tried it.

2. At the time that I reviewed the application, Freshbooks had no ability (without using what seemed like obtuse workarounds) to accept retainer bills. Sure, they offer up all sorts of bizarre ways to get around this. See my comment #1 — workarounds are cute for mom and pop but don't scale to firms with multiple billers.

3. For some odd reason there was a requirement that each of my clients have their own project. For example I couldn't make one master project called "annual support agreement" and assign it to multiple clients.

Now admittedly a lot of the above issues also exist with competitors. As I looked around at other billing solutions there were applications that were far worse.

Unfortunately in the billing area it started to become apparent that when most people begin an online invoicing application they look around and borrow the "good ideas" from what's out there rather than what makes sense and scales.

Freshbooks = Cool application for mom and pop but doesn't scale beyond 3 or 4 timekeepers (and if they're doing any volume that's probably pushing it).

Just my .02

I hear your concern for looking beyond the U.S. market. I know we feel the pain being Canadians trying to gain access to U.S. tools and services to test, or even use personally. And we normally never can get UK services, so that's really difficult. We were even delayed developing our iPhone app because the iPhone didn't arrive in Canada for a year.

But, it's early days right now. In the near term given the world today, the immediate problem is cost-effective growth, and for many companies that means focusing in your own backyard, especially if it is a large one like the U.S. or the UK.

And let me underscore the point: Selling at home is the Right Thing to do.

However, it's not the 1980s any more. One very lucrative path on the Internet is to grow into other jurisdictions. I have faith that in the medium term we will see these barriers falling, at least for some services. We can see that amongst certain payment gateways, for instance, who as a group are ahead of the rest of us by a business cycle.

So, we'll keep at it and we'll get there. It wouldn't be a worthwhile problem if it were easy!

Speaking of which, I'm always open to doing an integration with folks in any part of the world. You can reach me at sunir splat freshbooks.com

– Cheers, Sunir, Chief Handshaker, FreshBooks