FreshBooks prices by how many clients you bill. That single choice tells you who it was built for, and it is not a company with a thousand customers and a bank feed to reconcile.
FreshBooks charges by the number of clients you bill. Five on the entry plan, fifty on the next one.
That is not a pricing quirk. It is the product telling you what it thinks a business looks like: a consultancy or an agency with a manageable roster of customers, where the invoice is the main event and the books are what happens afterward.
A SaaS company with eight hundred subscribers does not have eight hundred billable clients in the FreshBooks sense — but it does have eight hundred sources of revenue to recognise, a payment processor depositing net of fees, and a bank feed that has to reconcile to all of it. The work is on the ledger side, and the ledger side is where FreshBooks is thinnest.
It shows in the plan structure. Double-entry accounting, bank reconciliation, and accountant access all start at Plus. On Lite you have an invoicing tool with expense tracking attached, which is a reasonable thing to be and is not a general ledger.
The draft invoice. FreshBooks is explicit that a draft has not been shared with the client and stays out of your reports until you mark it as sent. That is a genuine pre-commit state, and it is the same idea Equated is built on.
The limit is the same one Xero has. It covers the document a human was always going to look at anyway. It does not extend to an arbitrary posting — a categorised bank line or a journal entry lands as finished work, indistinguishable from something a person considered and typed.
If you bill people for your time, FreshBooks is a better invoicing product than most accounting software will ever be, and the invoice your client opens looks like someone cared.
If your revenue arrives from a processor in batches and your month-end is a reconciliation problem, you are buying an invoicing tool to do a ledger’s job, and paying by the client to do it.
| Capability | Equated | FreshBooks |
|---|---|---|
| Double-entry general ledger | Yes | Plus plan and up |
| Bank reconciliation | Yes | Plus plan and up |
| Billable client limit | None | 5 on Lite, 50 on Plus |
| Accountant access | Yes | Plus plan and up |
| Draft state before it reaches the ledger | Every posting | Invoices |
| CPA-reviewed year-end filing | Optional add-on | No |
On the Plus plan and above. The entry-level Lite plan does not include double-entry accounting, bank reconciliation, or accountant access, so the cheapest way into FreshBooks is not a general ledger at all. This is the opposite of Wave, where the double-entry ledger is the free part.
It limits billable clients by plan — five on Lite and fifty on Plus, with Premium and Select unlimited. The limit is on clients you bill, not on contacts, but for a business whose customer count grows on its own it is a cost that scales with the wrong number.
No. FreshBooks says a draft invoice has not been shared with the client and will not appear in reports until you mark it as sent. That is a real pre-commit state, and it is the same instinct Equated is built on — the difference is that FreshBooks applies it to invoices, while Equated applies it to every posting.
Yes. Currency is set per client, so once a client is configured in a currency, their invoices default to it. Reporting is a narrower story — the expense report shows one currency at a time.
Claims about FreshBooks last verified August 25, 2026