FreshBooks lets you build a network of contractors

Managing contractors, especially on a big project, can be a pain. But FreshBooks, an online service for sending invoices, wants to help with a new feature for managing your contractor network.

At first, this might not seem like a big improvement, since FreshBooks is an invoicing service, and there’s nothing new about letting contractors send you an invoice. What’s cool, however, are the tools that FreshBooks has built up around those services, so that you can handle both sides of the billing equation fairly easily. You can ask all your contractors to send you their bills within FreshBooks, compile all those numbers into one bill, add your own fees, and send it on to your client. There’s no juggling of multiple accounts.

Also, because of FreshBooks’ time-tracking features, you can see what those contractors have been up to and how much progress they’ve made. If cash-flow is an issue, you can also configure your account so your contractors get paid by your client, without revealing sensitive information about those contractors to your client.

Tortonto-based FreshBooks is self-funded and says it has more than 800,000 users. Here’s a demo video.

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