Online Invoicing Comparison: Harvest vs FreshBooks

For many companies, hiring several people to run the payroll office can become costly, but with a simple online invoicing system such as FreshBooks or Harvest, companies are learning that they can cut the cost of hired help, maintain their invoices by viewing, paying, discarding, or disputing online, and create a comfort zone for their company.

For many of the online invoicing systems, you can choose the method of payment that you receive. There are several payment gateways that can be used with both FreshBooks and Harvest such as PayPal, Authorize, iTransact, and of course your major debit or credit cards. With online invoicing systems you are not only speeding up the payment process but you are also able to contact your client about an unpaid invoice without having to lift a finger or send a reminder email because most invoicing systems automatically do this step for you. Both programs allow you to service clients all over the world. You will find that having either invoicing system can be beneficial when billing an out of country client in their monetary form.

You can easily track your time spent working on certain projects through FreshBooks or Harvest. For those that have spent days trying to create an invoice through Excel or Word, switching to an invoicing system that provides a way to instantly track your time and expenses and insert them into your invoice has saved them time, effort, and money creating free time to earn more revenue. Both of these online invoicing systems provide you several options for tracking your time. However, Harvest goes into more detail with team tracking among other additional options.

When you managed to serve a client well, then you’ll probably want to do business with this customer again on a more frequent basis. With recurring invoices and payments, with both FreshBooks and Harvest, you will be able to create an invoice each month or every other month depending on the client’s frequency. This recurring invoice will be automatically created according to the frequency that is registered with that client’s data information through the invoicing system. This information is updated by the company with the start date and the number of occurrences in Freshbooks, but in Harvest the number of occurrences is omitted.

There are many differences between FreshBooks and Harvest when they are being compared. However, both of these online invoicing systems are similar in that they track time, have several payment options, and allow you to invoice clients once or recurring. Although they are similar, FreshBooks promotes the use of invoices more, while Harvest promotes time keeping and time-sharing more. These two online systems are great for any company, but depending on the companies needs and pricing arrangements, one might be more beneficial in the long run than the other for that specific company.