FreshBooks, a Toronto-based accounting startup with over five million users worldwide, has after a long wait released an Android app to complement its current mobile offering on iPhone and iPad.
The app is free for existing customers, and allows users to engage in what the company calls “cloud accounting,” which includes tracking expenses and invoicing clients, using existing addresses in a contact list.
The app also builds in a way to photograph and parse receipts, a growing trend among mobile accounting firms. Once taken, the photo can be used to send the expense to a client or accounts payable.
“We view mobile as an extension of the full Freshbooks web experience,” said Faraz Shafaghi, Product Marketing Manager. “We found that users perform three primary actions on their phones: creating invoice, creating an expense, tracking time.”
One of the more interesting aspects of FreshBooks for Android is the timer function, which lets users track their time spent on a project and directly bill the client for that time. It’s all very modern, adhering to the “work anywhere” mantra that many creative professionals take for granted.
While the app is not tablet-optimized, it works great on smaller slates like the Nexus 7 or Galaxy Tab 3 8.0. FreshBooks is also promising an update to its official iPhone app, which still isn’t iPhone 5-optimized.
According to Product Manager, Ramin Shokrizadeh, the company found that because many Freshbooks users were companies running many of the same lower-end Android phones, they had to optimize the app for smaller screens and slower processors.
Over the course of seven months, the app came to fruition and is on feature parity with the iPhone version. “We want to make the customer feel at home on mobile, and experience the Freshbooks brand. On Android, we wanted to use as many guidelines as possible, while continuing to fit our brand.”
[source]Google Play[/source][via]FreshBooks[/via]
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