Cloud Accounting Startup FreshBooks Launches An iPhone App, So Users Can Do Invoicing On The Go

Cloud accounting startup FreshBooks is designed to make billing, invoicing, tracking expenses, and managing customer relationships easier for small and medium-sized businesses. The company now wants to take that a step further by providing its users with an iPhone app that will allow them to do all those things–and more–from wherever they are.

In the past, small business owners would have to wait until they got back to their offices to do certain accounting tasks, like entering time or tracking expenses from on the job. With the new app, FreshBooks users can now instantly create invoices, manage client information, track time that they’ve spent with clients and expenses, create estimates, and get reports based on the information they enter.

The mobile app can be downloaded and used for free by FreshBook clients, and should save time for users. More importantly, since they can tend to estimates and invoices on the go, it means they can (hopefully) get paid more quickly. Think about a contractor working on a customer’s site: By being able to create and submit an estimate on the fly, he should be able to get a response a lot faster than if he had to go back to the office and create it. Clients can also invite their staff or sub-contractors to projects to log hours or submit their own expenses in-app, rather than having to do it manually later.

FreshBooks had long ago rolled out an API that allows third-party developers and app makers to create invoicing workflows that integrate with its back end system. So there were about 60 or 70 add-on apps that worked with FreshBooks, but this is the first mobile app that was created by the FreshBooks team.

According to FreshBooks CMO Stuart MacDonald, the company now has more than 5 million users, compared to about 2.5 million in May 2011. The Toronto-based company has about 100 employees, and has paying customers in more than 130 countries worldwide.