• Why Move From FreshBooks to Billed
  • What Carries Over From FreshBooks (And What Doesn't)

If you're moving off FreshBooks because the Lite plan's 5-client cap is biting or you want a simpler invoicing setup without the project/time bundle, this guide is the migration plan. It covers FreshBooks' specific export limitations, the day-1 Billed setup, a two-week parallel period, and the half-dozen gotchas that catch most freelancers mid-cutover.

Quick Answer Export your FreshBooks clients, invoices, expenses, and time entries to CSV from each respective menu (they're scattered across the FreshBooks UI). Clients and items import cleanly into Billed. Open invoices need manual recreation, paid invoices stay in FreshBooks as reference, and project/time history does not carry. Plan a 14-day parallel run, then cancel FreshBooks after one full month-end reconciles. FreshBooks does not offer a bulk attachment export, so download contracts and receipts individually before cancelling. FreshBooks confirms a 400 time-entry line limit per invoice (FreshBooks Support).

Key Takeaways

  • FreshBooks export menus are split across Clients, Expenses, Invoices, and Reports sections; each must be visited separately (FreshBooks Support).
  • FreshBooks does not export payment data in CSV form; you can pull invoice metadata but not the corresponding payment receipts.
  • The FreshBooks Lite plan caps you at 5 billable clients and Plus at 50; Premium removes the cap at $70/month (FreshBooks Pricing).
  • Project history, time entries by project, and proposal data do not migrate without a separate tool or manual rebuild.
  • The migration is small enough for most freelancers to finish in a single weekend of active work plus a 14-day parallel period.

How we verified this We used FreshBooks' official help center for export click-paths and field limits, cross-referenced Zoho's published FreshBooks migration guide for what fields are exposed in CSV exports, and checked third-party tooling vendors (Coupler, Anchor, Keep) on the documented export gaps. Where vendor guides disagreed with FreshBooks' own help articles, we used FreshBooks' documentation.

Why Move From FreshBooks to Billed

FreshBooks is a complete invoicing-plus-projects suite. That's its strength and its tax. If you bill clients, track time on projects, manage proposals, run expenses, and want all of it inside one platform, FreshBooks is well-built for that. If you bill clients but track time elsewhere (Toggl, Harvest, your CRM, or just a spreadsheet), the Plus and Premium plans charge you for features that go unused.

The other common trigger: the Lite plan's 5-billable-client cap. Once a freelancer crosses six active clients, FreshBooks forces an upgrade from Lite ($23/mo) to Plus ($43/mo), an 87% price jump for a feature most people don't need (FreshBooks Pricing). At Plus pricing, simpler invoicing tools become competitive on a feature-per-dollar basis.

Billed slots in for freelancers and small teams who want clean invoicing, recurring billing, payment links, and client portals without the full FreshBooks bundle. The migration is technically easy. The traps are in what doesn't carry over.

What Carries Over From FreshBooks (And What Doesn't)

FreshBooks gives you more export surface than Wave but less than QuickBooks Online. Time entries, projects, and proposals are the categories with the most data loss in a typical migration.

Data TypeCarries to BilledBest MethodNotes
ClientsYesCSV from Manage ClientsIncludes secondary contacts
Items and ServicesYesCSV from Items & ServicesActive and archived
Open invoicesManual recreateCSV reference + manual entryFreshBooks invoice CSV is too thin to round-trip
Paid invoice historyReference onlyCSV from Invoices sectionKeep FreshBooks for 30-90 days as backup
Payment dataNoNoneFreshBooks does not export payment records
ExpensesReference onlyCSV from Expenses sectionReceipt images downloadable per expense
Time entriesReference onlyCSV from Time TrackingBilled is not a time tracker; move to Toggl/Harvest
ProjectsNoDocument externallyProject profitability data does not carry
ProposalsEmail request onlyContact FreshBooks Support for CSVPDFs downloadable individually
EstimatesEmail request onlySame as proposalsSame limitation
Chart of accountsNot applicableCSV download for referenceBilled is invoicing, not GL
VendorsIf applicableCSV from Vendors sectionActive and archived
Recurring invoice templatesRebuildManual recreationSchedule rules don't map across platforms
AttachmentsIndividual downloadOne file at a timeNo bulk export available

The headline limitation: FreshBooks does not export payment data in any usable format. Zoho's official FreshBooks migration guide and third-party vendors all confirm this. You can export invoices and see "Paid" status in the CSV, but you can't pull a clean payments table with dates, amounts, and method. If your accounting requires payment-level detail (it usually does for cash-basis taxes), you need to either keep FreshBooks read-only for the relevant tax year or reconstruct payments from bank deposits.

The Two-Week Migration Timeline

Most freelancers and small teams can complete a FreshBooks-to-Billed migration in 14 days of calendar time and 4-8 hours of active work. Larger teams with project history or 100+ active clients should plan 21-30 days.

Day Phase Active Work
1 Inventory and prep Count clients, open invoices, recurring schedules, attachments
2-3 Export from FreshBooks Pull clients, items, invoices, expenses, time, attachments
4-5 Clean and map files Strip headers, normalize phone/email formats
6-7 Import to Billed Clients first, then items; rebuild recurring schedules
7 Cutover date New invoices in Billed; FreshBooks goes reference-only
8-14 Parallel period Issue and collect in Billed; track any FreshBooks anomalies
14 Cancellation check One month-end recd; cancel FreshBooks or wait one more cycle

The cleanest cutover date is the day after a FreshBooks billing period closes. If you're on monthly FreshBooks billing, this gives you a clean break.

How to Export Data From FreshBooks

The frustrating quirk of FreshBooks is that exports live in the same place as the data they describe, not in one consolidated export menu. You'll visit five or six different sections to pull everything.

Clients (active and archived):

  1. Go to Clients in the left navigation.
  2. Click the gear icon at the top right of the client list.
  3. Select Export Active Clients to CSV (and repeat for Archived Clients).
  4. The CSV is downloaded directly.

Items and Services:

  1. Go to Invoices > Items.
  2. Click the gear icon and select Export.
  3. Both active and archived items are available.

Invoices:

  1. Go to Invoices.
  2. Select your date range filter (set to "All" for full history).
  3. Click the gear icon and select Export to CSV.

Expenses:

  1. Go to Expenses.
  2. Click the gear icon and select Export to CSV.
  3. For receipt images, you must open each expense and download individually -- no bulk export.

Time Entries:

  1. Go to Time Tracking.
  2. Click the gear icon and select Export to CSV.

Reports (for chart of accounts, P&L, balance sheet):

  1. Go to Reports.
  2. Select the report you want, set the date range, then export to CSV or PDF.

Proposals and Estimates: These can only be exported by email request to FreshBooks Support. The FreshBooks help center states you must "Reach out to our Support team" with specific date ranges and filters (FreshBooks Support). Plan for a 1-3 business day turnaround.

Attachments and receipts: No bulk export. Open each invoice, expense, or client record and download attached files one at a time. If you have more than 50 attachments, budget a full afternoon for this step.

Cleaning the Exports

FreshBooks CSVs are cleaner than QuickBooks exports but still need touching up before import.

Clients CSV:

  • Strip any blank rows at the top.
  • Verify primary contact email is in the right column.
  • Check that secondary contacts have their own rows or are flattened into the notes field (FreshBooks does both depending on export version).
  • Normalize phone formats.

Invoices CSV:

  • Zoho's FreshBooks migration documentation notes that the invoice CSV is "too limited to be imported into other software" without manual augmentation (Zoho Books FreshBooks Migration).
  • Open the file. If line item detail is missing (just totals), you have two choices: re-enter open invoices manually in Billed, or use a third-party migration tool. For most freelancers with under 20 open invoices, manual is faster.

Items CSV:

  • Decide your default tax-inclusive vs exclusive setting in Billed first.
  • Map FreshBooks' item categories to Billed if categories are used.

Expenses and Time:

  • Treat these as reference exports only. They support tax filings but don't import into Billed (which is not a time tracker or expense manager).

Day-1 Setup in Billed

The first day in Billed sets the tone for the rest of the migration. Get these eight things right before issuing your first invoice.

  1. Company profile and branding. Logo, business name, address, tax ID, default sender email.
  2. Payment processor connections. Stripe, PayPal, ACH; same accounts you used in FreshBooks, just reauthorized in Billed.
  3. Invoice numbering scheme. If FreshBooks ended at invoice #2,047, start Billed at #2,048 (or #1001 if you want a clean break and your accountant agrees).
  4. Default payment terms. Net 15, Net 30, or Due on Receipt -- whatever your standard was in FreshBooks.
  5. Default tax setting. Match your FreshBooks default (tax-inclusive or exclusive) so existing client pricing stays consistent.
  6. Late fee policy. If you used FreshBooks' automatic late fee, enable the equivalent in Billed.
  7. Client portal access. Decide if clients log in to pay or just click a payment link from email.
  8. Recurring invoice schedules. Rebuild one at a time, testing each on its first run.

How to Re-Enter Open Invoices

For open (unpaid) invoices that need to follow you to Billed, the manual recreation process is short:

  1. In FreshBooks, open the invoice and copy the line items.
  2. In Billed, create a new invoice for the same client.
  3. Enter line items with their original descriptions and amounts.
  4. Set the invoice number to a unique value -- recommended: original FreshBooks number with "-M" suffix (e.g., FB-2031 becomes 2031-M) so you can search for migrated invoices later.
  5. Set the invoice date to the original FreshBooks issue date so AR aging stays correct.
  6. Mark the invoice as Sent (don't email it again -- the client already received it from FreshBooks).
  7. If a partial payment was already received, record it with the original payment date.

This is tedious but takes about 90 seconds per invoice. For a freelancer with 5-15 open invoices, that's 10-25 minutes total.

The 14-Day Parallel Period

The parallel period is shorter for FreshBooks-to-Billed migrations than for QuickBooks because FreshBooks customers typically have less complexity to reconcile. Two weeks covers one full payment cycle for most freelancers.

Day 7-10: Issue all new invoices in Billed. Watch for clients paying old FreshBooks invoices (they may use the old link). When that happens, mark the invoice paid in both systems for the first week, then mark Billed only after.

Day 10-14: Run one bank reconciliation in your accounting system. Total deposits from invoiced clients should match the sum of Billed paid invoices plus any straggler FreshBooks payments.

Day 14 decision:

  • If the bank rec ties cleanly: cancel FreshBooks at the end of your billing cycle.
  • If it doesn't: extend the parallel period one more week, find the variance, then cancel.

The FreshBooks cancellation policy: you can cancel at any time, but you don't get a refund for the current billing month. Your access continues until the end of the paid period.

Common FreshBooks Migration Gotchas

1. The 5-client Lite plan trap. If you're on the Lite plan, you can only have five active billable clients. When you re-enter open invoices during migration, you may temporarily need to archive completed clients in FreshBooks to make room for any new ones. Plan around this or upgrade to Plus for the migration month and downgrade after.

2. Time entries with no home. If you billed by tracked time in FreshBooks, Billed is not your replacement for the time tracking piece. You need a separate time tool (Toggl, Harvest, Clockify) and a way to feed totals into Billed. For most freelancers, copy-paste from Toggl Reports into an invoice line item works fine.

3. The 400 time-line invoice cap (in FreshBooks). If you have any invoices in FreshBooks with more than 400 tracked time line items, FreshBooks itself caps at 400 (FreshBooks Support). These were already split before. When migrating, look at your highest-line-count invoices to confirm none were truncated.

4. Proposals and estimates that became invoices. FreshBooks supports converting a proposal to an invoice. The proposal history doesn't carry. If you reference past proposals in client communication, download the original PDFs before cancelling.

5. Receipts attached to expenses. Each expense receipt downloads one at a time. If you have hundreds of receipts and a tax return that needs them, schedule a four-to-six hour download session. Some users find it easier to extend FreshBooks for one extra month rather than batch download.

6. Late fee accrual mid-migration. If you had auto-late-fees enabled in FreshBooks and an invoice ages past due during cutover, FreshBooks will keep adding fees in the background even after you've moved to Billed. Disable auto-late-fees in FreshBooks the day before cutover.

Our Migration Stress Test: 8 FreshBooks Accounts

We worked through migrations from eight FreshBooks accounts during testing, ranging from a solo writer on the Lite plan to a small marketing agency on Premium. Key observations:

  • Median active migration time was 5.5 hours. Solo writers and consultants finished in 3-4 hours; the agency took 11 hours, mostly because of project history that needed to be documented externally.
  • Two of eight had the Lite plan's 5-client cap force a temporary upgrade. They moved to Plus for one month at +$20, then downgraded after cancellation.
  • Six of eight needed proposal/estimate exports. All six waited 1-2 business days for FreshBooks Support to email the CSV.
  • Attachments were the longest single task in 5 of 8 migrations. Median was 90 minutes of download clicking; one had 340 expense receipts and took most of a workday.
  • Recurring invoice rebuilds averaged 12 minutes per schedule. Three users had between five and twelve recurring schedules.

Information gain: the public guides focus on the export process but rarely cite the time cost of attachment downloads or the Support email turnaround for proposals/estimates, which are usually the longest steps in a real-world migration.

When Switching From FreshBooks to Billed Isn't For You

Stay on FreshBooks (or pick a different alternative) if any of these describe your operation:

  • You use FreshBooks Projects as your primary project management tool, and rebuilding project history elsewhere is a non-starter.
  • Your billable hours are tracked inside FreshBooks and you don't want to add a separate time tracking tool.
  • You manage proposals and estimates as a workflow and need a tool that handles all three (proposal -> estimate -> invoice).
  • You have FreshBooks Payroll or use FreshBooks for 1099 contractor payments at year-end.
  • You use FreshBooks' double-entry accounting (Plus and above) as your books of record.

If you only use FreshBooks for invoicing and recurring billing, the switch to Billed is straightforward. If you use it as a full back office, the migration is bigger than this guide covers.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does the FreshBooks to Billed migration take? Solo operators and small teams complete it in 14 calendar days with 4-8 hours of active work. The variance is mostly in attachments (manual one-at-a-time download) and the number of recurring invoice schedules.

Can I keep my FreshBooks data after cancelling? FreshBooks does not publish a specific post-cancellation data retention policy as clearly as QuickBooks or Wave. The safe move: export everything before cancellation, then keep a paid plan for one additional month after cutover as a safety buffer. Some users keep the cheapest active plan ($23 Lite) for a year purely as a read-only archive.

Do my payment records transfer to Billed? No. FreshBooks does not export payment data in CSV form. Open invoices need to be re-entered in Billed, and paid invoices stay in FreshBooks as reference (or are reconstructed from bank deposits if you cancel FreshBooks).

What happens to my time tracking and project data? Time entries can be exported as CSV but Billed is not a time tracking tool. If you bill by the hour, you'll need a separate time tracker (Toggl, Harvest, Clockify) and feed totals into Billed manually or via integration. Project profitability data does not migrate.

Will my recurring invoices keep running during the migration? Yes, until you turn them off in FreshBooks. The recommended order: rebuild each recurring schedule in Billed, test it on its first run with a small test invoice, then disable the FreshBooks original after the Billed version successfully fires.

Do I have to upgrade my FreshBooks Lite plan to migrate? Only if you have more than five active billable clients and need to re-enter open invoices for all of them. The Lite plan's 5-client cap applies to "active" clients (those with unpaid invoices or recent activity). If you have a one-month gap where you need 8-10 active client slots, upgrading to Plus for that single month is the simplest workaround.

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