What management consultants need from their software, from sources outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa:
Disclosure: we publish Nexa, and this read comes from the vendors' own feature lists. We have not tested either product with working consultants. FreshBooks covers the billing side of consulting well. Self-employed consultants are paid by the hour or by the project, and FreshBooks has built-in time tracking, invoice templates, a client portal and a mobile app, so hours can be logged from a client's site. The $43 monthly plan adds proposals, retainers, financial reports, receipt scanning, bank reconciliation and accountant access. Accountant access matters most for a consultant who pays self-employment tax and quarterly estimates, because a preparer can work in the books directly. Its list does not mention what the travel rules ask for: trip location and purpose, or meals kept apart for the 50% limit. It also does not mention a quarterly estimate calculator or time logged by client location. You would cover those with expense categories, notes and a worksheet. Lite caps you at 5 billable clients, and archived clients count until you delete them. A consultant with a rotating roster should plan on Plus.
Nexa covers the billing core too: invoices, estimates, quotes and proposals that convert to invoices, payment plans, time tracking, Missions (projects) with sub-steps, and jobs with costing and profit per job. Its bookkeeping has expenses, receipt scanning, bank reconciliation, profit and loss and 1099 summaries. Clients can pay by card through your own Stripe account, and it works offline, which helps on a client site with poor connectivity. Its feature list has nothing for trip logs, meal-limit handling or estimated-tax calculation, the same gap as FreshBooks. It has no QuickBooks or Xero sync, so a preparer gets exports instead of working live in your books. It is software you own and run yourself, with no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding. Without the optional $4.99 monthly Cloud Sync it runs on one device, which matters if you split time between an office and client sites. Its automated emails, such as reminders and sequences, send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years FreshBooks at $43 a month costs $1,548 ($516 a year). Nexa costs $279 once, or $458.64 with Cloud Sync for the same three years. If you work from one laptop and your preparer is happy with exports, Nexa is a defensible way to save money. If you log time from a phone between sites, want your preparer in the books live, or want a vendor to call when something breaks, stay with FreshBooks. Before deciding, use the free 30-day FreshBooks trial to enter one multi-day client trip with a meal, one hourly invoice and one milestone invoice. Then ask your preparer whether they can work from what you produce. Whichever tool you use, keep a separate trip-and-meal log and a quarterly estimate worksheet, because neither tool does that work for you.
Our read for management consultants: Stay with FreshBooks if you want a preparer working live in your books and a vendor to call, since Nexa has no accountant access or hosted support and neither tool handles trip, meal or estimated-tax records.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs management 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 management 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 management 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 management 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 Management 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 management consultants. You own it like you own your financial modeling and scenario spreadsheets.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small management 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 management consultant gets paid to see what an organization can't see about itself, and the day is a mix of listening, analysis, and persuasion. Mornings often hold stakeholder interviews, sitting with a VP of operations or a regional manager and drawing out where the business actually hurts, then comparing those stories against the numbers, because executives describe the company they wish they ran and the data describes the one they have. Midday is analysis: building a financial model to test whether a proposed cost cut survives a downturn, mapping a broken process to find the handoff where deals stall, or benchmarking the client against where its market is heading. A consultant typically carries more than one engagement at a time, a turnaround for one client and a growth strategy for another, and the workplan is fragile, derailed whenever a key executive cancels the interview the next phase depends on. Afternoons go to synthesis and the slide deck, distilling weeks of work into a handful of recommendations a board will actually fund, which means anticipating every objection before the room raises it. Underneath all of it runs the unglamorous discipline of tracking time, because the engagement is billed by the hour or the milestone, and an untracked Tuesday is revenue that simply disappears.
Real management consultants near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a management consultant? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every management 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 management 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 management 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 management 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 management 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