What iso consultants need from their software, from sources outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa:
FreshBooks covers the billing side of an ISO consulting practice well. Its own list includes built-in time tracking, professional invoice templates, a client portal and a mobile app. Plus adds proposals, retainers and bank reconciliation. Premium adds project profitability, which helps if you price fixed-fee gap analyses and want to know what each one earned. The part of the trade with regulatory weight is not in its listed features. Under ISO/IEC 17021-1 clause 5.2.7, prior consultancy is a significant impartiality threat, and the recognized mitigation is that a certification body does not certify that client for at least two years. An accreditation committee said in March 2017 that a one-person consultancy counts as a 'body'. So if you also audit for a registrar, you need a dated record of when each consulting job ended, kept apart from audit work. We found no engagement start and end dates, no consulting-versus-auditing separation and no two-year clearance date in FreshBooks' features. We also found no headcount-based audit-day estimate (the IAF MD 5 table gives 1.5 days for a 1-5 employee QMS) and no calendar for revision deadlines such as the expected ISO 9001:2026 transition. Its client cap also makes it a poor place to keep this history. Plus covers 50 clients, archived clients still count, and deleting a client frees a slot but erases the record you would need later.
Nexa has the same gaps, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. It has no engagement-end record, no impartiality-window flag, no audit-day calculator and no revision-deadline calendar. What it does offer is closer to a place to write things down. Missions (projects) with sub-steps and templates, tags and CRM notes let you open one mission per engagement and type the end date by hand. Nothing computes the two-year date or warns you when it passes, so this is a memo, not a compliance record. Its billing is otherwise comparable: quotes and proposals that convert to invoices, recurring invoices, time tracking, a client pay portal through your own Stripe account, and bookkeeping with bank reconciliation, profit and loss, and a balance sheet. It lacks QuickBooks or Xero sync, Google Calendar sync (calendar export is an .ics file) and an app marketplace. It is software you own and run yourself, with no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding, and without optional Cloud Sync it runs on one device. If you use its automated emails or reminders, they send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years FreshBooks at $43 a month comes to $1,548 ($516 a year). Nexa is $279 once (or 3 payments of $99), or $458.64 with Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month. Pick the billing tool on price and support, because neither one decides whether you can accept an audit subcontract. If FreshBooks works for you, keep it. If you are starting fresh, want to pay once and can live without a vendor support desk, Nexa is a reasonable choice. For the impartiality record, don't use either tool. Use a separate engagement register, which can be a practice-management tool or a locked-down structured spreadsheet. Each row needs the client, consulting or auditing, start date, end date, and a formula-computed 'clear to audit' date two years after the end. Add a per-client tab for headcount-based audit-day estimates and one for revision and transition deadlines. That register is small enough to set up in an afternoon, and it is the file a registrar or accreditation body would actually ask to see.
Our read for iso consultants: Neither tool tracks engagement end dates or the two-year impartiality window, so keep that record in a dedicated engagement register or structured spreadsheet and choose FreshBooks or Nexa only for billing.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs iso consultants $516/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 6.5 months it has cost less than FreshBooks, and you own it after that. What it is not: hosted-for-you software with a support desk and a roadmap you can lobby. That is the trade, and the rest of this page is the detail behind it.
Nexa is $279 once, about $23 a month over its first year. Its Drain Guard reads your expenses (from a linked bank, an imported statement, or ones you type in), finds the charges that repeat, and adds them up by the month. Keep or Cut then walks you through them one at a time. Cancel $23 a month of charges you'd forgotten about and Nexa has paid for itself inside the first year, before you count the FreshBooks bill you'd stop paying.
It depends on what you find and what you cancel, so we don't promise a number. In our demo data, Drain Guard finds 5 subscriptions adding up to $110.13 a month. That is sample data, not a customer's.
The verdict for iso consultants: Neither FreshBooks nor Nexa is the main system for this work; start with software built for it. Nexa only makes sense beside it, at $279 once against $1,548 for FreshBooks over three years.
Client records, scheduling, invoicing and time tracking are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
None of that is a software problem you can buy your way out of in one click — it is why the tool you pick matters more than what it costs. FreshBooks solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
Today's list price is $43/month — $516 a year, from FreshBooks's own pricing page. Every figure below is that price, multiplied. Nothing is projected.
Nexa: $279 once (or 3 × $99). Over the same three years, that is $1,269 less.
If FreshBooks raises its price, the three-year cost goes up; if it cuts it, the cost comes down. We don't guess which. Add-ons, extra seats and card-processing fees are not included, on either side.
| Feature | FreshBooks | Nexa |
|---|---|---|
| Invoicing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scheduling | ✗ | ✓ |
| CRM | ✗ | ✓ |
| Time Tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Full Accounting | ✓ | ✓ (SIMPL) |
| Task Management | — | ✓ |
| Works offline | — | ✓ |
| Price | $43/mo | $279 once or 3 × $99 |
| 3-Year Total | $1,548 | $279 |
| You own it? | No — stop paying, lose access | Yes — forever |
✓ and ✗ for FreshBooks come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as FreshBooks lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
Straight from FreshBooks's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
FreshBooks is the better call if you need very user-friendly for non-accountants specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
FreshBooks says it is "perfect for everyone from self-employed professionals to growing business owners." It lists four audiences: freelancers, solopreneurs, businesses with employees, and businesses with contractors. (freshbooks.com)
What people outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa say:
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Software doesn't do the actual work — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every iso consultant: find the work, manage it, bill for it, get paid. Each step has a tool — and the right single tool runs the whole loop, so the handoffs are automatic and you get back to the actual work. Tap a step to see what gets automated.
An inquiry becomes a proposal becomes a signed engagement — the terms and the retainer set.
The work you're paid for — with the hours, tasks, and expenses tracked against the engagement instead of reconstructed at month-end.
The work becomes the invoice — the hours, the add-ons, the materials, the deposit credited — totaled and sent, instead of re-typed at 9pm.
Paid by card or link, the deposit credited, and what's overdue chased — without you doing it by hand.
You can stitch four separate subscriptions across these four steps, or run one tool that does the whole flow so a booking becomes a job becomes an invoice becomes a payment without re-typing. Either way the goal is the same: less time on the business of the business, more on the actual work. (Nexa is built to be the one — but the honest options for each step are above and below.)
This is the connection that makes the rest worth it. A iso consultant's job already holds the services, the hours, the add-ons, and the materials — so the invoice builds itself from the work instead of you re-typing it at 9pm. Toggle an add-on or nudge the hours and watch it recompute.
You didn't write this invoice — the job did.
FreshBooks plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median ISO Consultant earns $55,000/year. At $516/year, FreshBooks is a recurring slice of that — paid again every year, whether the year was good or not. Owning the same jobs outright is $279 once, and the slice stops.
Nexa is $279 once. Invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, accounting — all connected, built for iso consultants. You own it like you own your ISO 9001 / 14001 / 27001 standard documents.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small iso consultants business that owns its tools and is sick of renting software, Nexa replaces your whole stack for $279 once. If you're scaling into a large team with dedicated admin staff, a bigger platform may fit better — and we'd rather tell you that now than sell you the wrong thing.
Client records, scheduling, invoicing and time tracking are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
An ISO consultant takes a company from nothing to certified, and the day's shape depends on where each client sits on that road. Early-stage clients need a documented system built from scratch: writing the quality policy, mapping the processes the business actually runs, and creating the procedures, forms, and records the standard requires, all in language the staff will use rather than file away. Mid-stage work is implementation and internal auditing, walking the floor to see whether the new procedures are being followed, then training the client's own people to audit themselves so the certification doesn't collapse the moment the consultant stops coming. Pre-audit days are intense: a gap assessment against the standard clause by clause, a mock management review, and a punch list of everything the registrar will catch. After a stage 1 audit, the work becomes closing nonconformities, root-causing each finding with the responsible manager and proving the fix before stage 2. Across all of it, the consultant is running several clients at different milestones, one drafting its first document control procedure, another a week from its surveillance audit, and the constant risk is letting one client's policy template or audit schedule drift into another's binder. Evenings go to readiness tracking and reminding clients which deadlines are closing in.
Real iso consultants near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you an iso consultant? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every iso consultant on Nexa →
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
You paid for these once because good tools last. That's the bar your software should clear too — priced like a tool you own, $279 once, not a subscription that costs more than your kit every year.
We build an iso consultant's guide the same way every time, and we'd rather you trust it than take it on faith. Nexa is our product, so the test we hold ourselves to is simple: a tool only "wins" a job here when it genuinely does that job better for an iso consultant — and where something free, open-source, or buy-once does it better, we say so and link you to it. Where Nexa falls short (payroll is the honest example), we name the alternative outright.
Found something out of date? Prices change and we don't catch every move the day it happens. This guide is published and maintained by the Nexa team; if a figure here is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — getting it right matters more to us than the sale.
For solo iso consultants and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. FreshBooks may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
FreshBooks has features like Very user-friendly for non-accountants and Built-in time tracking that some businesses rely on. For most solo iso consultants, these aren't dealbreakers.
At $43/month, Nexa pays for itself in 6.5 months. After that: $516 saved every year.
Yes. Nexa is $279 as a one-time payment, or 3 payments of $99 ($297 total). Either way it's a one-time purchase — no subscription, no recurring fees ever.
Own your tools. Stop renting your software.
Get Nexa — $279 Once