Cashboard Manages Your Invoices, Estimates and Projects

Today I’ve got an invoicing and time management tool named Cashboard for you. Cashboard manages your time, your customer estimates, invoices and can work with payment software for direct client payment.

When I loaded Cashboard for the first time, it has many of the same features as FreshBooks which is pretty large in the online billing/invoicing space. Cashboard has more time management features, FreshBooks has more invoice options. Pricing is almost identical between the two. You can check out our FreshBooks coverage but for the balance of this review we will focus on Cashboard.

Cashboard provides a Web application to create project estimates, manage time against a project, invoice the client and receive payment electronically. The free account has some limits and prices range from $12-$140/month depending on the number of projects to manage. During the signup process, you setup a customized URL for your clients to use - which is nice as it can be customized - slap on a cname from your domain and the customer will never know Cashboard is powering your invoicing.

Cashboard offers a desktop widget for managing time on a project without having to keep a browser open. You click the start button, begin working and click again to stop the time monitoring. Frankly this is a great way to accurately keep track of the time spent on a task and I wish I had this for some of my staff over the years.

One of the groovy features in Cashboard is the ability to completely customize the invoice and estimate templates. I use Quickbooks and there are limits to how good you can make the documents look.

The way founder Seth Banks communicates in the Cashboard blog makes sure his customers are up-to-date with where the app is and where it’s going. He’s open and honest which is important when you are building a relationship with your customer and not just selling him or her a pre-made burger.

With the percentage of home-based businesses and consultants continuing to rise, services like Cashboard should see a stable growth rate. The key for Cashboard is getting out past the tech sector - there are plenty of other business types to keep new customers entering the system.