Christopher Monaghan of Time59 wrote to me shortly after I posted my rave about Outright and Freshbooks and suggested that I try out their program. It’s another online software program aimed at small businesses, offering everything from time tracking to client billing. I haven’t tried it out myself, but one good thing going for it is that Monaghan and his folks are offering it for a flat rate of $49.95/year. Freshbooks, for example, has a varied fee structure depending on how many clients you have. I pay $14/month for up to 25 clients, but companies with more can check out their tiered pricing system. For $149/month, for example, you’re allowed up to 5,000 clients. (I guess if you have more than that, you’ll probably be needing a more robust application than Freshbooks to handle your client load. Lucky you.)

A couple of drawbacks:

• If you’re already working with Outright and like its expense/income tracking system, you’ll need to move all of that to Time59.
• It does not work with PayPal or any other Web-based payment system. I have a client who prefers to pay me by PayPal, and I expect more who’ll want the same option.

Anyway, if you’re looking to simplify your bookkeeping and are still on the fence as to what program to try out, you might want to give Time59 a once-over. I’d love to hear from those of you who try it out and adopt it, or from those who have already embraced it and are using it for their business.