What lean consultants need from their software, from sources outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa:
Disclosure first: the publisher makes Nexa, so weigh this accordingly. We start with where FreshBooks is stronger for a consultant. It covers hourly billing through built-in time tracking and professional invoice templates. Proposals, retainers and financial reports arrive on Plus, the $43/month plan that does the core job. Accountant access matters here because quarterly estimated payments and Schedule SE figures usually go through a preparer. Project profitability on Premium helps you see which fixed-fee engagements actually paid. The client count is the main constraint. Lite covers 5 billable clients, and archived clients still count toward the limit. A consultant with a few long-running clients may never hit it. One with steady turnover will need Plus or higher. We have no information that either product sets aside money for estimated taxes or produces a Schedule SE report. Plan on your accountant or a separate tracker for that.
Nexa covers the document side of consulting. It has estimates, quotes and proposals that convert to invoices, recurring invoices and payment plans. It also has time tracking, expenses, projects (Nexa calls them missions) with sub-steps, and a pay portal where clients pay by card through your own Stripe account and sign estimates. On the bookkeeping side it has profit and loss, cash flow, bank reconciliation, receipt scanning and 1099 summaries. The 1099 summaries are useful if you pay subcontractors. Its limits are practical. There is no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding, and no accounting-package sync or import. Calendar export is an .ics file only. Automated emails, including payment reminders, send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. Without the optional Cloud Sync it runs on a single device, so it does not suit someone who invoices from a phone on a client site. Nexa has no accountant-access feature in what we can state.
Over three years FreshBooks at $43/month is $516 a year, or $1,548. Nexa is $279 once (or 3 payments of $99), and $458.64 with Cloud Sync at $4.99/month. The gap is real, but price is not the deciding factor for most consultants. Stay with FreshBooks if you send invoices from several devices, rely on a preparer who logs in to your books, want a vendor to call, or need reminders to go out without your own computer being on. Consider Nexa if you work from one machine, are comfortable owning and supporting your own software, want proposals, time, expenses and 1099 summaries in one place, and hand your accountant exports. Try either before committing. FreshBooks offers a 30-day free trial.
Our read for lean consultants: Most consultants who rely on accountant access, vendor support and reminders that send on their own should stay with FreshBooks. Nexa fits only a single-device solo consultant who is happy to run their own software.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs lean 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 lean consultants: Stay with FreshBooks if the needs in our read above apply to you. If they don't, Nexa covers the core invoicing, scheduling and books for $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 lean 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 lean 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 Lean 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 lean consultants. You own it like you own your value stream mapping markers and butcher paper.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small lean 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.
A lean consultant spends the day on the floor, not in a conference room, because waste only reveals itself where the work happens. Mornings often start with a gemba walk, following the actual flow of a product from raw material to shipping, watching where it waits, backtracks, or gets reworked, and timing the steps with a stopwatch while resisting the operators' instinct to perform for the clock. Building a value stream map is a full-day affair, taping butcher paper to a wall and pulling real cycle times, changeover durations, and inventory counts so the team can see the difference between the few minutes of value-add and the days of waiting. The signature work is facilitating a kaizen event: a cross-functional team locked in for a week to attack one problem, rearranging a cell, cutting a changeover from an hour to ten minutes, building a kanban so the line stops overproducing. The hardest part isn't the week, it's the month after, when the action items compete with daily firefighting and the new standard work quietly erodes. So the consultant builds visual controls, runs 5S audits, and coaches supervisors to hold the gains, returning to check whether the improvement stuck or slid back to the old way.
Real lean consultants near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a lean consultant? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every lean 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 a lean 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 a lean 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 lean 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 lean 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