But what is it?

FreeAgent is an online accounting and small business management service that simplifies the running of your freelance, contractor or consultancy business by effortlessly handling client and project management, invoices, bank accounts and tax.

Up until now, FreeAgent has only been available for UK Sole Traders, Partnerships and Limited Companies. The Universal version changes all that so now companies across the globe can start using FreeAgent to organise their business finances.

Universal supports configurable Sales Tax and VAT/GST and allows this to be reported on. What it doesn’t yet have is the full business and personal tax capabilities of the UK version (writing bespoke accounting engines for each country is no easy task as you might imagine!), but this is something we’ll be rolling out in different countries over the coming months, probably starting with one of Ireland, Canada, Australia or New Zealand.

Technology

This release gave us the perfect opportunity to upgrade our server hardware and we’re now in the right position to be able scale with demand reasonably effortlessly. I’ll be delighted when we have to test this out ;-)

We’ve also moved our main domain from freeagentcentral.co.uk to freeagentcentral.com to reflect our new ‘global’ status, although .co.uk will remain active for the time being.

If you’re a freelancer, contractor or consultant running a small business and you haven’t yet tried FreeAgent out, then head on over and sign up for a 30-day free trial. Your data is safe and secure and you can cancel whenever you like.

We reckon it’s the easiest way to organise your business finances and, to paraphrase one of our happy users, “it will make you feel smart, not stupid, about your company’s finances.”

So, to simplify managing a small business (and to make doing so cheaper), I hooked up with Ed, Roan and Dennis to produce FreeAgent Central, an online service targeting UK-based freelancers, consultants and contractors, and this week we’re proudly announcing the launch of the public beta version.

In a nutshell, FreeAgent offers client management, invoicing, time tracking, expenses, payroll and tax calculation for sole traders and limited companies, securely, from your favourite web browser.

There are lots of other great features, with dozens more in the pipeline, so check out the product tour for a more in-depth look. If it floats your boat, sign up for a free beta tester account and prepare to say goodbye to spreadsheet hell!