After 10 years of growing the business, FreshBooks is now adding Cloud Accounting to its brand and marketing efforts to help better define the company’s direction for accountants and customers.
The small business-focused company has mainly offered online invoicing, time tracking and billing functions to over 5 million users since coming to market less than 10 years ago. Now, while retaining the FreshBooks name, the company is looking to add the Cloud Accounting label to its messaging.
“We’ve seen that more people refer to us as accounting,” said chief executive and co-founder Mike McDerment. “Small business owners think they need this, and I think it’s a better descriptor for us. I think you will see a number of things that will reinforce what we believe cloud accounting to be for the vast majority of small businesses.”
While McDerment declined to reveal any specifics about new accounting-related features in FreshBooks, he did mention that the software’s Account Overview feature, which gives users a dashboard-style look at their business, is the most popular and should give an indication of the direction of FreshBooks for the foreseeable future.
McDerment also did not express concern over the increasingly competitive cloud accounting landscape, instead affirming his belief that FreshBooks is “the number one cloud accounting specialist for small business owners.”
He also stressed not to expect FreshBooks to start looking upmarket, away from its core client base.
“We are still squarely focused on the small business,” said McDerment. “Our huge differentiator as compared to anyone else is our direct focus on small business owners. We will work hard to help them work with their accountants, and while there may be people around our space that do some things we do, I’m thinking as a customer, and we are the number one specialist.”
