FreeAgent Software

Pros

You can effectively manage and keep a track of your invoices, expenses and calculate your profits in one place. For each account, there are no such limits on the number of users allowed to access an account. Round the clock customer service and support system are provided. The application is integrated with payroll functionalities. You can contact their accounting experts if you encounter any issues. You can check out the thirty-day trial version, then move on to the paid version, they don’t charge any setup fee.

Cons

It is difficult to export information (if you need it in the CSV format). Expensive when compared to other accounting solutions.

Pros

* Auto integration with banking API feeds
* Intelligent learning for your regular banking transactions
* Templates for sending invoices etc
* VAT & SA form integration with HMRC

Cons

* Slightly clunky UI for viewing recent expenses
* Inability to remove user's who have left the business

Pros

Incredibly easy to learn how to use even if you've never managed a business before. Perfect for freelancers as well as small-businesses. Nice design both for the website as well as the PDFs created.

Cons

Large businesses and more experienced accountants are likely to find the functionality a bit limiting.

Pros

Where to start. I LOVE Freeagent! It's so easy to use, it gives great reports, it automatically pulls in bank statements! Brilliant!

Cons

The only thing I would like to see is a little more clarity regarding the different categories of spending and VAT eligibility.

Pros

Functional and a UI really nice design. Good pricing, it's one of the best investment for a freelancer who have some time working. This app really help me in may freelance career

Cons

some times it's difficult to go into some tools. you cant import all the info you want to into this app. No have a computer app, you must have to go into the navigator or your cell phone

Pros

I love how it links to my bank account and easily allows me to enter bills and mark them paid. Some trickier transaction types were not obvious but the help screen is comprehensive.

Cons

I haven't found an account reconciliation feature. I am used to that with QuickBooks and would like to have it here. It's possible there is a reconciliation feature and I haven't spotted it yet.

I don't see any now.

Pros

It looks like it has a lot of features but it doesn't work in a logical way.
The tech support used to be available almost 24/7 but the quality and availability have shrunk down significantly.

Cons

This is the most frustrating of all of the accounting software that we reviewed. Everything (even mistakes) gets locked in and can't be edited or amended. There are so many basic functions that just don't work and all customer services do is give you complicated workarounds, most of which don't actually achieve the required outcome. The bank feeds often don't work and you have to log in daily to manually update them. The price is way to high and not good value. The software is not easy to use and what used to be great customer service is now a waste of your time and call tariff. To add insult to injury, they have just been bought over by a bank that has a terrible reputation for so many reasons and will tarnish the reputation of FreeAgent. I'd steer well clear of this software.

Pros

The end to end connectivity. Booking time spent with a client turns into an invoice turns into a payment at the bank - and all this is tracked. What used to take hours in excel is all at a glance in FreeAgent.

Cons

I wish that there was a way to use their time tracking module as a separate product. I no longer run a business but would love to use their time tracker with my team at the larger org I now work for.

Pros

It's an incredibly easy to use all-in-one accounting solution that's built for freelancers, all the way up to large businesses. Creating and managing invoices is very easy and you can even sync it up to your bank account. Whilst many of the more advanced accounting features go unused by myself I can clearly see the value in them for others.

Cons

It's not the cheapest solution if you're just creating a few invoices each month but for any typical independent professional it's a great solution. I can't think of any real cons to this product.

Pros

I've worked with accounting software before so it didn't need much time to set up. I also like how everything is linked – contacts to invoices to banking feed... lots of the features are automised so you don't have to do everything twice and the system learns and adapts to your set up, e.g. it starts guessing the categories for expenses and other items in your banking feed.

Cons

It doesn't come cheap which for a freelancer is perhaps the biggest hurdle. But it is good value for money.

Pros

We use it where I work as a way to track work hours. Usage is pretty simple and the features are sufficient. If you need to track time precisely, there's a nice start/stop function, and if you don't, there are means to insert a whole week in a row. If you're a developer, you'll appreciate the APIs that allow building customized reports for accounting.

Cons

If you don't need precise time tracking, but need to split hours on different activities, data entering becomes pretty slow. You can generate monthly reports to check what to expect from the paycheck, but checking if you made mistakes in the data entry is as difficult as it is entering it.

Generating reports for financial statement preparation for client's year-ends

Pros

Visually pleasing, generates reports that small businesses require to stay on top of financial performance.

Cons

It probably would not be an ideal software if your business grows as you may need financial reporting needs would be more complex than what this software generates.

Pros

Syncing with your bank accounts allows you to keep track of expenses, income and bills really easily. There is good help in the support section and it is good to be able to get some automated analysis of the figures too.

Cons

The time tracking feature is not very flexible and has caused me issues, I am using a different software to track time now. The design also is quite accountant-oriented

Pros

Easy assess and works great for tracking my time and billing clients. The bank feed works well. I like the overview information of the home screen dash board.

Cons

I have an accounting background and am a bit frustrated with how to pay bills and reconciling an account. It has not been very easy for me to understand how some of the functions work - relative to other software that I have used. Some one with out my background might find it easy to understand.

Pros

We've been using Freeagent for over 5 years. In that time frame my company has grown from being a sole-trader to an incorporated limited company with employees. To say that Freeagent has helped facilitate that growth would be an understatement.

We now use Freeagent for our VAT submission (saving us £200pq accountants fees), Payroll (saving us £10pm per employee), Sending out client estimates/invoices, and what we originally bought it for... Book keeping and accounting.

We have Freeagent connected to our bank feeds, meaning we are only ever 24hrs out of date with our live bank accounts. This is now a common practice with similar software, but for us it came just at the right time.

Their team of inhouse accountancy experts is also an incredible resource that we use around once a quarter, or whenever something new crops up that we might need some help with. We still use the skill of an account for filing our end of year accounts, but we could even do this with free agent.

Cons

The one thing that has been a niggle like a tiny pebble in your shoe, or scratch on the roof of your mouth, is that you cannot send a remittance! Many people have requested this functionality but it has largely been ignored by the freeagent team. I have no idea whether it is a technical or philosophical reason they've just not engaged with it... If they did implement this functionality it would pretty much make it perfect for my companies needs.

Pros

Overall experience is good. It allows to better organised both my bookeeping but as well my employee work due to its usability. Love as well the API integration that allow me to create custom analysis.

Cons

Too much focus on UK client. We are an Italian company and some of the functionality available for UK are really complex to achieve for us and required workaround.
Billing only in 1 currency is crazy, why do you have invoice in multiple currency but billing cannot be done? It should be a simple addition to make but it has been year that people asked for this and still not implementation.
Country specific payroll. Although I am aware it will be impossible to enable payroll for every country out of the box why don't allow customer to customized the payroll functionality to meet payroll requirements or add important deadline for taxing purpose.
Even the export functionality can be improve and should be added to every areas from timesheet to bill, from invoice to expense with filter that allow you to specify the data you want to export.
VAT calculation for Intrastat - due to the internationalisation of business should be easier to export only bill and invoice that are related to country outside your normal business area.
What about language package? Again if not possibile provide an LDK that allow client to customize the interface.

Pros

It just works. The software looks good on desktop and connects to the mobile app well. From invoicing, to time tracking, to payroll, tax returns ... so much functionality and pretty much error free. Unlike other financial software, you don't need to pay more for features like payroll and multi-currency. Win.

Cons

It would be useful to have a few more multi-currency features (e.g. multi-currency bills and expenses).

Pros

FreeAgent is a fantastic product. I have only needed to use support a couple of times and they were more unusual questions.

As a freelancer, keeping an eye on income and expenditure, billing and chasing invoices and recording expenses with my phone is really important. Add to that the easy submission of my tax return and it really is a great piece of software.

Cons

I am a little disappointed that I could not receive any of the discounts offered to new customers. (e.g. 6 months half price).

My accounting needs are quite basic and I haven't used Free Agent for long enough to have found cons yet.

Pros

The visibility it provides me on my business. Easy to use, the link with the bank account makes things very straightforward.

Pros

Love the user interface, which is easily customisable and visually it is really appealing. Makes accounting fun!
Easy to use, once you know how to access some of the features.
I have a straightforward business in private medical practice and this software takes care of my invoicing, accounting and expenses all in one, with automatic updating of all the relevant information at your fingertips.
Both my secretary and I can access the software from anywhere, so it makes for easy team-work.
One of the best features for me is the projects section, where I can keep track of the numerous expert reports that I have on my books at any one time.

Cons

Sometimes working out how to find something, or to alter a document isn't intuitive, and I have had to refer to the website for help, which has always been useful (so far).
(NB I think the user who didn't like being referred to My Business Works is being unnecessarily unfair to this software because they had to go through a Barclays intermediary - Barclays are known for their poor service, but this is not FreeAgent...)