FreshBooks’ accounting tool gives small businesses an easy way to get customer reviews

Small business owners have enough to do. If anything, they need more of the basics done automatically.

FreshBooks gets it. Today the company announced it’s adding an automatic reviewing and feedback system to its cloud-based accounting software.

Now, every time a small business completes a job and submits an invoice to a customer, the software asks the customer to say, on a scale of 0-10, how likely he or she is to recommend the small business to a friend or colleague. The customer can also type in a review.

The small business owner and the customer can share the review on social networks, effectively turning the review into a testimonial. That’s one more thing small business owners don’t need to take care of.

And it could help FreshBooks stay fresh in a crowded market.

The 11-year-old company competes with GoDaddy’s Ronin, Harvest, Intuit’s Quickbooks, Wave, Xero, and other providers of cloud-based accounting software.

In a beta program for the new system last year almost a quarter of the positive reviews have ended up being shared with potential customers and on social networks, according to a statement from the company.

The company previously tried to stand out with an iPhone app for sending invoices, logging expenses, and keeping track of time.