FreshBooks Releases Business Grading Tool

FreshBooks announced yesterday that their online invoicing and time management "report card" is out! The report card aspect of FreshBooks will allow customers to evaluate their business metrics versus parallel companies within their industry segment.

This free service offers small businesses access to market data focused on financial aspects like average monthly revenue, invoice size, invoice collections and other pertinent comparisons. FreshBooks recently surpassed the 150,000 business user landmark and the company is essentially geared to disrupt the traditional reporting industry.

The Freshbooks system anonymously aggregates customer data from voluntary participants. The data is interpreted from a large pool of data and distributed in easy to read reports for individual businesses. Report cards can be of enormous help to small businesses without the added cost of research reports and other market data.

We are serving an under-served segment of small businesses and disrupting established players in the research and reporting arenas," said Mike McDerment FreshBooks CEO. "Since FreshBooks is an online service, we make the whole experience easy and painless, and now we also have the ability to offer valuable information that is simply not possible through software. Report Cards are a great resource for small businesses to understand how they stack up with others in their industry."

FreshBooks offers packages from the well named "moped" version with good free capabilities to the "Time Machine" premium product that allows users to manage up to 5000 clients. FreshBooks is currently offering a 30 day free trial and a money back guarantee for new users. I think we are seeing the tip of the iceberg in online business solutions. This is another fast growing segment of Web 2.0 that will probably rival traditional variants if given half a chance.