A consultant sells hours, not widgets. The job of the software is to turn tracked time into a clean invoice without re-keying, then keep you tax-ready. We reweighted the rubric so billable time tracking carries the most weight, and ranked the five tools that fit a solo or small consulting practice.
For consultants we put billable time tracking and invoicing at the top, because the gap between hours worked and hours billed is where money quietly leaks. Price and ease come next; deep tax and ERP features matter less than getting paid for every hour. See the full rubric →
Time tracking to invoice35%
Invoicing & client billing20%
Ease of use20%
Tax & reporting15%
Integrations10%
01
RANK
★ Editor’s Choice
FreshBooks
Best for billable time
Built around the consultant workflow: track time against a client, flip it into an invoice, chase the payment. The timer and the invoice are the same product, not two bolted-on modules, so billable hours stop falling through the cracks. Lite caps you at five clients, so count your roster before you pick a tier.
The quiet overachiever here: native time tracking, project billing and a genuinely free tier under fifty thousand dollars in revenue. A consultant gets the billable-hours workflow without paying for it early, and the wider Zoho suite is there when you bolt on a CRM. The interface is busier than FreshBooks, which is the trade.
A pleasure to run books in, with unlimited users on every plan. The catch for consultants is that real project and time tracking only land on the Established tier at ninety dollars a month, so the billable-time workflow you actually need sits behind the top plan. Start here when you know a team is coming.
The default your accountant already knows, with the deepest tax and reporting story in the field. Time tracking, though, only appears on Essentials at seventy-five dollars and feels like an add-on rather than the core loop. You buy QuickBooks for the ecosystem and the books, not for turning hours into invoices.
Free double-entry accounting and unlimited invoicing, which is great until you remember a consultant bills time. There is no native time tracking, so you end up logging hours in a spreadsheet and re-keying them, which is exactly the leak this category is supposed to close. Fine for a side practice with flat fees.
Pricing verified as of June 2026. Vendors change plans often · check the vendor for current pricing.
At a glance
✓ full · ∼ partial · — none
CapabilityFreshBooksZoho BooksXeroQuickBooksWave
Native time tracking✓✓∼∼—
Project profitability✓✓✓✓—
Free plan—✓——✓
Quarterly tax tools∼∼∼✓—
Client cap on entry plan∼—∼——
Mobile app✓✓✓✓✓
Common questions
What is the single most important feature for a consultant?
Time tracking that flows straight into an invoice. Your product is hours, and any tool that makes you track time somewhere else and re-key it will lose you billable hours every month. That is why we weighted time-to-invoice at 35% here instead of treating it as a minor feature.
Can I just use Wave for free as a consultant?
For a low-volume, flat-fee practice, yes. But Wave has no native time tracking, so the moment you bill by the hour you are back in a spreadsheet reconciling timesheets against invoices. If you bill hourly, the few dollars a month for FreshBooks or a paid Zoho Books tier pays for itself in recovered hours.
FreshBooks or Zoho Books for a solo consultant?
FreshBooks if you want the cleanest time-to-invoice loop and will happily pay for it. Zoho Books if you are cost-sensitive or already living in other Zoho apps; it does the same core workflow free under fifty thousand dollars in revenue, at the cost of a busier interface. Both are correct picks; the deciding factor is budget and whether you want the wider suite.
Do I really need project profitability tracking?
If you quote fixed-fee engagements, yes, because that is the only way you learn which clients are quietly unprofitable. If you bill pure hourly with no scope creep, it matters less. FreshBooks, Zoho Books, Xero and QuickBooks all do it on the right tier; Wave does not.