FreshBooks

FreshBooks began in Toronto in 2003, founded by web designer Mike McDerment after he grew frustrated manually reformatting invoices in Microsoft Word for his freelance design clients, a tedious, error-prone process shared by countless other small business owners and freelancers at the time. He built a simple web-based invoicing tool to solve his own problem, then realized the same tool could serve a much larger market of small businesses facing an identical annoyance.

A widely used small-business staple

FreshBooks grew steadily from that simple invoicing tool into a fuller cloud-based accounting platform aimed specifically at freelancers and small businesses, a market segment that larger enterprise accounting software companies had generally underserved. The company remained headquartered in Toronto through its growth into one of the more widely used small-business accounting platforms in North America, part of a wave of Toronto-founded software companies that built national and international customer bases from a Canadian home base.

Sources

• FreshBooks — About us
• Wikipedia — FreshBooks

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