What refurbished phone sellers need from their software, from sources outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa:
Disclosure first: the publisher of this page makes Nexa, and this read comes from each vendor's published feature lists, not hands-on testing. A refurbished phone seller needs three things: an IMEI/MEID on every purchase and sale record, since many phones have no serial number; the warranty term or 'as is' wording on each unit's invoice; and records that survive a Form 1099-K or an audit. Under California AB 632 a dealer can report an IMEI in place of a serial number, gets up to 10 extra days if the number isn't known at purchase, and reports serialized property daily or the first working day after receipt. FreshBooks covers the bookkeeping side well. On Plus ($43 a month) you get invoicing, expenses, receipt scanning, financial reports, bank reconciliation and accountant access, which together give you the sales and cost records you need whether or not a 1099-K arrives. Plus covers 50 clients, and archived clients count toward that, so a shop with many one-off retail buyers will need to delete old ones. Its feature list shows no IMEI field, no per-unit warranty term and no dealer reporting.
Nexa has invoices, estimates, expenses, receipt scanning, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, a balance sheet, sales tax tracking, purchase orders, and job costing with profit per job. For stock it has only a simple count per product, with no full inventory management. Its list also shows no IMEI/MEID field, no per-unit warranty tracking and no dealer reporting, so it has the same gap as FreshBooks on the parts specific to this trade. It has no point-of-sale or card reader. Online card payments go only through your own Stripe account. It has no QuickBooks or Xero sync, and no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding, because you own and run it yourself. Any automated emails go out only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years FreshBooks costs $1,548 ($516 a year). Nexa costs $279 once, or $458.64 if you add optional Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month for all 36 months. The saving is real, but neither tool closes the compliance gap, so price shouldn't decide this. Whichever you use, the per-unit IMEI, the warranty or 'as is' wording and the daily dealer report have to come from somewhere else. What a refurbisher needs is secondhand-dealer or serialized-inventory software that records an IMEI for each unit at purchase, carries it through to the sale, prints the warranty term or disclaimer on the receipt, and produces the dealer report. Keep your current bookkeeping tool for the books. If you're on FreshBooks, test during the 30-day free trial, which needs no credit card, whether an invoice line can hold an IMEI and warranty text. Treat that as a stopgap, not as compliance. Don't switch to Nexa to fix this problem, because it won't.
Our read for refurbished phone sellers: Neither tool shows IMEI-per-unit records, per-sale warranty terms or dealer reporting, so a refurbisher needs serialized secondhand-dealer inventory software alongside whichever bookkeeping tool they already use.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs refurbished phone sellers $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 refurbished phone sellers: 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.
The books and job tracking are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot into something you buy once. 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 refurbished phone seller: 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.
A lead, a call, a referral — and a quote or estimate that turns it into a booked job.
The part you actually get paid for — with the time, materials, add-ons, and tasks tracked as you go, not guessed at later.
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.)
FreshBooks plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median refurbished phone seller earns $32,000/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 refurbished phone sellers. You own it like you own your a phone repair toolkit (pentalobe drivers, suction cup, spudgers, picks).
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small refurbished phone sellers 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.
The books and job tracking are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot into something you buy once. The sections below price both routes honestly.
The first thing he does with any phone, before a screwdriver touches it, is run the IMEI, because a gorgeous handset that's blacklisted, still financed, or carrier-locked is a paperweight, and he's not sinking a screen and a battery into a dead end. Cleared phones go on the bench for triage: battery health, screen response across the whole panel, Face ID or fingerprint, cameras front and back, every button and the charge port. The common jobs are a screen swap and a battery replacement, and here the trap is parts, a cheap aftermarket screen that ghosts or loses touch sensitivity is a return waiting to happen, so he pays up for quality and watches his margin shrink on the cheaper models where the repair cost is a big slice of the resale price. Cosmetic grading is a discipline: an A is genuinely clean, a B has light wear, a C is functional but scuffed, and he photographs the actual scratches so a buyer who wanted pristine isn't surprised. The thin-margin reality is that a mid-tier phone might only clear forty dollars after a sixty-dollar battery-and-screen job, so he has to choose which devices are even worth refurbishing. He boxes them clean, with a protector on and a tested cable, like a retail unit, because presentation closes the sale.
Real refurbished phone sellers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a refurbished phone seller? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every refurbished phone seller 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 refurbished phone seller'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 refurbished phone seller — 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 refurbished phone sellers 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 refurbished phone sellers, 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