While all small business owners are painfully aware that invoicing is the life blood of any company, it is the smallest among them — the consultants, freelancers and providers of professional services — who live and die with each bill. And these folks, when asked, count invoicing as chief among their worst headaches.

They do have options, such as Intuit’s QuickBooks, Microsoft’s Office Accounting Express and Office Accounting Professional, and Sage Software’s Peachtree’s First Accounting, but these software products can be complex and unwieldy for sole practitioners. Excel and Word only make matters worse, because they make it difficult to keep track of who paid what.

FreshBooks hit the scene over two years ago by exploiting this notion and providing users with an online invoicing and time tracking service that lets users easily create invoices and keep track of their payments. And with pricing that ranges from free for managing up to three clients to $39 per month for up to 1,000 clients, the service is accessible to most small business owners.

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