One of my ex-colleagues at Stink Digital put me onto Free Agent Central, a nifty web service for managing your business online with estimates, billings, earnings et al.
The Free Agent service makes it ‘super easy’ to run your business, or at least appears to, which is why it is handy they provide a 30 day FREE trial to test your woes. It didn’t take me long to get signed up and set up, that’s for sure, but then this is where the fun begins. Cutting to the chase:
Great Service for UK Business
Commerce no longer readily respects national boundaries, though Free Agent seems to steadfastly pinned to the outline of of the British Isles. The service is very clearly and squarely aimed at freelancers who work in the UK and who perform 100% of their business functions within UK borders. To their target audience, usability aside, Free Agent Central performs a flawless service, but the greater the percentage of your revenue that comes in from overseas, the more annoyed you will become with Free Agent.
The lack of a blanket coverage of support for multiple currencies really sucks. You can easily estimate and invoice in 2 or more currencies, tying in the costings and billings to the XE.com data taking the pain out of having to track the FOREX market rates yourself, but that’s pretty much where it stops. Importing data form your bank accounts or Paypal, gets butchered. All transactions return as UK points at an exchange of 1 to 1, despite the currency being included int he files, and when filling in your own expenses, whether for foreign trips or purchasing software online in another currency, you have to convert it yourself which either means using the present day exchange or waiting for the transaction to hit your statement.
Things To Watch Out For
The major hurdle of multiple currency flaws aside, there are a few other annoying things I didn’t like so much about the service:
- Non-Taxable Income – If as a freelancer you end up working for your previous employer. They are legally obliged, as I understand it, to deduct tax as source, given that moving from permanent to freelance could be seen as a “tax avoidance” scheme. To this end, your corporation tax will end up getting totally miscalculated in the system.
- Invoice Themes – There is a mismatch between the HTML versions of the invoice and the PDF that gets generated, and there this no way to create your own styled themes for them. No doubt any designer would be annoyed by this, though I suppose it is not the end of the world. A properly and legally formatted invoice is of course ultimately key.
- Site Search & Reporting – It would be super handy to have company wide search for all kinds of resources and the ability to build some custom reports from them. Of course you can export data out of the system and use something like Crystal Reports or Excel to do the same, but it obviously adds complexity.
- Help Systems – In system help is rather sucky, and Free Agent are using Get Satisfaction for ticket track et al, which is fine to a degree, but I wish the basic and first line of support was a lot more effective. That being said the are definitely responsive and don’t ride rough shod over security and privacy for it – plus points to Free Agent!
Otherwise Great
I understand that any service has its shortcomings, and the reality is that Free Agent Central is the perfect solution for a UK-based business and the prospects for its future look rosy and great. I would definitely recommend it to anyone steadfastly set in the UK, but beyond that, it has to sort out major flaws for those wishing to use it as a 100% of their accounting solution.
I suppose the added advantage of their focus on the UK market is that they really know their UK Tax and Accountancy inside out. This means they can provide extensive and useful information and tools to that end. The Free Agent blog provides a dearth of information for newbies and old timers alike. Allowing you to keep abreast of what is going on from budget-to-budget.
My Wish-list for Free Agent Central
Having used the service for almost a month now, the following are a few of the items I would love to see in Free Agent Central. No doubt they will be coming, now that the company has received a round of funding, but I will write them down anyhow:
- Multiple Currencies – First and foremost is for the system to be able to handle multiple currency for every kind of resource in their system, from estimates, to bills, to bank accounts etc. According to a support specialist I spoke to, this functionality is in the pipeline, but they are not able to disclose any road map.
- Email Alerts – The system makes it easy for you to auto-email your clients, something I loathe, as I run a personalised business, not a monolithic corporation. On the flip-side, however, I would also like to be alerted when recurrent invoices and other events occur in the system and re-act accordingly, rather than being forced to log-in to do so.
- Flexible Invoices - It would be nice to be able to configure invoicing payment details and other things by territory, and to be able to enable and disable elements for different contacts. US payment details for US clients and the same for UK clients, makes sense.
So there you have it. Draw your own conclusions and feel free to ask any questions you have about my own experiences, or go sign up here!
Web-head & art collector, living in East London and huffing on the fumes of the planet since '78. Here are my thoughts.
N Raiss May 8, 2010
kashflow.com is possibly a better alternative if you are outside of the U.K. or in the U.K. but do trade with overseas businesses.
It’s more aimed at small businesses than just freelancers.
It has blanket coverage of currencies and the email alerts you mention. The invoice customization could be better than it is though.
Vincent Roman May 8, 2010
Nadia – Thanks for the tip, I will definitely check it out, although as with all these systems, getting started and then moving from one to another is always a pain in the rear end. As I understand it Free Agent is in the process of integrating multiple currency support, the only problem is who knows when :(
Michael Green May 25, 2010
Thank you for your comments and it will be a pleasure coming back to you with answers and observations in response,
My best,
Michael
Roan Lavery Jun 24, 2010
Thanks for the write-up Vincent. I just wanted to comment on some of your points and the feature requests.
Non-taxable Income – If you quit your job and then work for your ex-employer as a freelancer, but your relationship with your ex-employer is that of a quasi-employee, you could be at risk of getting caught by IR35. But in that case it would be your company, not your employer’s, that would be liable for the extra tax. You can tag projects in FreeAgent as being “within IR35”, to help you and your accountant work out the total IR35 deemed payment.
I think there’s also some confusion with corporation tax and income tax here. Corporation tax is the tax that a limited company pays on its profits. The deemed payment under IR35 is made up of PAYE (which is income tax) and National Insurance.
Invoice Themes – The on screen preview and PDF use exactly the same HTML. The interpretation of the CSS might be very slightly different but in general the pdf generation is excellent at reproducing what you see on screen. In fact is has better CSS2.1 support than IE. You can create your own custom CSS theme for your invoices too. It’s disabled by default but I can turn this feature on for if you like?
Site Search – We’re with you on this one. Site search would definitely be handy. It’s trickier than it sounds but it’s on our roadmap.
Help system – Have you seen our knowledge base:
http://www.freeagentcentral.com/support/kb
Multi-currency – We do support billing in multi-currencies but as you say, we don’t yet support multi-currency bank accounts. 2 reasons for this: the demand hasn’t been that high and it would require a lot of development time. We’ve just prioritised other things, that we know more people want, ahead of it.
Email Alerts – I can see how that would be useful, but it’s not something we’ve got planned for the short term.
Flexible Invoices – With the custom invoice template you do have plenty of control over what is displayed, and where, on the invoice, and we are currently doing some work on improved localised invoicing.
In general, we do appreciate all this feedback. We have to be honest and let people know that their favourite feature might take a while making it into the app, or may never make it at all, but we get a lot of feature requests and we have to make tough decisions about our priorities.
Thanks for taking the time to give us your constructive criticism.
Vincent Roman Jun 25, 2010
Roan -
Thanks for the extensive reply. Need to give it a proper read through when I get time. Unable to come up for air at the moment, but will definitely get back to you.
Vincent -
Russell Poulter Aug 19, 2010
I’ve just taken the plunge with FreeAgent after taking advantage of the 30 day trial and I have to say I’m very impressed. It makes managing your accounts very easy and straight forward. The best thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t get in the way of running your business.
A great App!
If you’re thinking of signing up you can get 10% off by using this code at sign up: 35nif55l
or by clicking this link : http://www.freeagentcentral.com/?referrer=35nif55l
Nice Review Vincent, thanks.
Gillian Harlick Jan 16, 2011
We’ve been using Freeagent Central for a while now – just preparing our second year accounts using it, and still love it. Great for a growing company like us.
The best thing about it is that you can set up recurring invoices and invoices for future dates which email out to clients automatically – no more needing to make sure you are in the office on the first of the month to get your invoices out.
The email reminders are also very useful and you can personalise all of it so you don’t lose that personal touch – in fact some of our customers have mentioned that they feel like its customer service when we are chasing invoices!
Before Freeagent Central accountancy software we used Sage Instant Accounts, which I found very complicated and time consuming for a small company like ours. I can honestly say Freeagent Central have quartered the time we spend doing the books whilst also making our accounts process more effective.
There is an iPhone app too, which I was very excited about. However you can’t raise invoices on it, only bill time and expenses to projects, and track your mileage etc.
As with the guys above, you can receive a 10% discount on your monthly subscription if you use this referral link: http://fre.ag/35nif55l
I will get 10% off my subscription too if you use it, so if you have found my review helpful, please use this link.