ANTenna Blog -- Business & E-Business

Business owners know how well they're doing relative to last year, last quarter, and last month. Knowing how you're doing relative to your competitors, is another story. That's the gap Freshbooks aims to bridge.

With the introduction of its new Industry Benchmarks service, online invoicing service Freshbooks, provides data based on anonymized reporting of Freshbook clients. The data allows business owners to compare their metrics from the previous 18 months to other businesses with the same of similar market segments. Among the data points that Freshbooks includes are average monthly revenue, invoice size, payment received timeline, online v. mail payment clients.

The target for the service is truly small businesses and freelancers -- a segment typically deemed far too small for this type of data. However, given the value of benchmarking to any business owner in charting business strategy, it's not a leap to speculate that the audience may quickly broaden.

Among the industries Freshbooks now offers benchmarks data for are Engineering, Cleaning Services, Trades, Management Consulting, Event Planning, Legal, and Transportation Logistics. Benchmark data will be released quarterly.

FreshBooks Industry Benchmarks from FreshBooks on Vimeo.