Bonsai Reviews & Product Details

Bonsai has helped me organise my work as a freelancer very well, I used to lose track of hours worked and could not find my invoices, now i is all in the same place

I don't like using the web interface, but I enjoy using it on the iphone app as well as using the integrated mac time tracker. I think there is no need for so many options.

Organising my work as a freelancer

Easy and Effective system for sending invoices and contracts.

I dislike the charges for recieving money sooner.

One stop shop for accounting, contracts and invoices.

Their customer service team is responsive, helpful, patient, and kind. They always respond to queries within a day or two. It's also easy to use.

It took a couple of weeks to get my Bonsai payments coming through. New account holders should expect an initial delay while the credit card company is verifying their bank information.

It tracks all financial information for my business in one place. Invoice management is simple and straightforward for all.

great for scheduling, CRM, invoicing, quotes/proposals, collecting payments and handling bookkeeping. It is my one-stop-sho for my small project management business. Highly recommended. High ease of use, easier implementation, fast and timely customer support as I use the app every day for my business needs.

They really need to improve the tasks and workflow of project such that the cliet portal becomes a dashboard for clients to see progress and the over timeline like in Notion. I really am at the end of my rope with asking for this essential update.

It is my CRM, client intake tool, time tracker, invoicing tool, scheduler too, proposal creator - all in one. I am captivated by user-friendly interface, it literally calms me while i am working to see the vegetative leaves. I dont have the time, energy or budget to get anything fancier. I tried 17Hats, but the interface was so problematic, I left.

Bonsai's time tracking features, invoicing, and contracts are all set up in mostly user-friendly ways that make it easy for me -- a freelance copywriter -- to manage my hectic work schedule and invoicing. I can toggle between multiple projects at once with the platform, which is great.

There have been some glitches while using - for instance, my hours once stopped showing up past a certain date, which - had I not noticed - would have lost me money during invoicing. The good news is that I reached out to customer service and they had the glitch fixed promptly. Another downside is that there is not an easy way (that I've found) to keep track of retainer payments. Several of my clients pay me monthly and then it's helpful for me to track time spent, without having to input a dollar amount on the invoice. I've found a way to make it work, but it's not intuitive on the platform. There are a few features of Bonsai that require personal workarounds like these.

Manages my invoices; allows me to track time easily; keeps track of my hours across multiple projects; keeps track of expenses; allows clients to pay me through the portal if they choose; sends auto reminders to clients on my behalf.

I like that I can have everything I need for my clients in one place. Their contract, proposal, and invoice is organized, and they can pay directly through the platform. Plus, I can track my time if I have a project that goes over the alloted number of initially-quoted hours.

Sometimes the editing is difficult for the contracts and I wish it were easier to create templates that aren't connected to a client's account.

I'm solving the problem of sending a million pdfs or Google sheets with this invoice and that proposal and this contract. It looks more organized and professional and sets the tone I want my business to have.

I love this platform as I like to keep track of how long a project is taking me to complete

I don't dislike anything about this software, it's great!

To keep accurate time of project timeline as well as to manage projects

Great UI easy to use created a proposal quickly

they do not send you a receipt and keep charging you every month and then did not refund me initially and I had to fight to get my refund.

Making proposals easy

I love their contracts. They are super easy to set up, flexible to edit, and quite a joy to work with. It's very nice to get a contract sent to a client in such a streamlined fashion, and not have to spend a bunch of time writing the entire contract from scratch (or copy pasting and editing from elsewhere) and then figuring out a service to use to upload and send it just for signature. Kudos to Bonsai for that part of the software.

Recently, I encountered what I would call a pretty critical bug with a contract. The support was very helpful in trying to resolve the issue for me. However, they couldn't resolve the issue. The uploaded SoW on the contract is, when you click the link, completely inaccessible to myself and the client. As a result, I do not trust the software at this point. They also have very aggressive auto reminder and auto invoicing settings, and sometimes I don't want that because invoicing and/or payments are already handled outside Bonsai. It seems like they're really trying to push you to doing everything inside of Bonsai. There have also been numerous bugs and frustrations that have taken a lot more time than I would've desired, such as: 1. My profile picture is still not correct and I can't edit it on one page. 2. It felt like a ridiculous process to change my email address (required me to submit sensitive personal life information documents). 3. It was very difficult to add a partner account for someone that had previously had a Bonsai account. Anyways, I can't recommend them at this point. The bug with the SoW not being accessible on an already signed contract is critical, and the fact that they couldn't fix it is even more concerning. If you're doing legally binding contracting software and a SoW isn't accessible then that's a serious issue.

Bonsai streamlines the creation of contracts for our company and getting those contracts signed. We occasionally use the invoicing features as well. It benefits us by speeding up the contract process and streamlining, in some cases, parts of the invoicing feature.

Nothing. I liked nothing. They have the worst customer service, and I never received my funds.

If I could leave a ZERO star, I would. This is the absolute worst company I've ever stumbled across. I am a freelance social media manager and I was attempting to make invoices for my clients through Hello Bonsai. The invoice sending was successful, and my clients were able to easily pay. At that point, Hello Bonsai decided not to release the funds to me. Instead they continued to ask extremely vague questions about my business that led to them saying I couldn't provide them with enough information to validate my business. Vague questions where it was impossible for me to provide a suitable answer. So my belief is that this was intentional to keep the funds for themselves. I even went to the trouble of having an executive, from the company that hired me, write and sign a letter stating they hired me to do their social media management. That still wasn't good enough for them to release my funds. I also provided website addresses, Instagram handles, marketing strategies from private meetings within my company, and much much more. None of it was "apparently" sufficient. Additionally, multiple people were responding to the support messages from Bonsai, and none of them were in the loop with each other on what I had already provided. So I went in circles and provided duplicate information to Bonsai at least 5 separate times. All of which was never "enough info". I cannot stress enough that no one should ever ever use this company. They are FRAUD and they intentionally make it impossible to get your funds. I'm hoping that my client gets refunded, but who knows if that will happen. I opened an online investigation of their website and services, so maybe soon they will be shut down for good. BEWARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They are not solving any issues. I ended up having to cancel my account completely and ask them to refund my client, which I'm hoping they actually do. I have very little faith in that, however. An investigation has been launched against Hello Bonsai.

Front end seemed great, was so pleased to set everything up and get rolling. Then the wheels started to come off.

My first transfer of funds from my client was held by Bonsai for 7 biz days. (ok I guess...it's in their policy) Then my next TWO client transfers were held up for an additional 7 BUSINESS DAYS before being deposited to me. (I do not as of writing this have access to the $$. I have set everything up correctly in my account, set up biz banking, been verified, etc. This is fraud and equivalent to what the large banks have done. Floating in $$ and collecting interest. I tried to bring this up with customer service twice and was given a generic, unhelpful response. Each response took almost a full day. In addition, my banking card never arrived and I was never able to set up my external account with micro deposits. I finally connected it today via a diff method. All in all I've had a TERRIBLE experience and my funds are still held hostage by Bonsai. Just awful. Buyer beware.

n/a

The UI and supposed ease of use. It sold me a mixed bag of seemlingly awesome features, none of which I was able to access based on not being paid out by the platform.

Bonsai makes it incredibly difficult to issue payment. It held 10 figures worth of money in limbo from me for about a month before I decided to issue a refund to my client, cancel the account, and look for a different option to receive payment. Not to mention, I reached out to support numerous times without a single answer.

They didn't solve any of my problems, in fact, they gave my money problems. When looking for a service to collect payment, receiving said payment should be easy. It's not.

User interface is very good. Good functionality. I have no comlaints about their software product.

Absolutely ZERO customer service. If you have ANY billing problem -- like your customer miskeys a credit card number -- you will NEVER get it resolved.

Invoicing service.