FreshBooks Launches Industry Benchmarking Service to Help Increase Performance

Toronto-based online invoicing service FreshBooks has announced the launch of an industry benchmarking service to help freelancers and small businesses make better decisions about their business. The service seems very similar to what PubMatic offers with their AdPrice Index. Basically FreshBooks takes anonymous data, aggregates the data and provides it back to site visitors so they can compare their actual numbers with the reported data.

The data will be updated quarterly and can be broken down into segments. FreshBooks explains how they get the data, "the data you see above is only collected from FreshBooks accounts that collect in US Dollars. We have removed the top ten 10% and the bottom 10% of the populations to eliminate outliers that might undermine the accuracy of the group as a whole. Also, we only include businesses we deem to be credible FreshBooks accounts."

Anyone can access the basic industry benchmark data and FreshBooks customers can request a "Report Card" which is tailored to their specific business.

This new program is smart on several levels. It helps everyone understand where they stand. It helps FreshBooks potentially gain a new service subscriber base. It also helps establish FreshBooks as a data service which can help drive new subscribers as the data is shared across the Web.