
Recommended by a friend - do any HNers use FreeAgent Online Accounting Software? - ColinWright
http://www.freeagent.com/?referrer=42fdjm42
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stevenbrianhall
FreeAgent is fantastic. I have been using it as my sole accounting software
for 3 years. If you need to track time and send out invoices (for a multitude
of clients), and do general accounting work (tracking income vs. expenses),
it's hard to do better than FreeAgent IMHO.

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citricsquid
what's with submitting an affiliate link without clearly labeling it, doesn't
that break the internet code of honor?

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ColinWright
You might find this hard to believe, but I don't actually know what an
"affiliate link" is, and nor do I know the implications of having submitted
one, assuming (as I infer from your comment) that this is one. All I did was
use the bookmarklet to submit to HN the page I was looking at.

 _Added in edit: I've just gone to look up and read about affiliate links, but
to be completely honest, I really don't have time now to try to decrypt all
the crap returned to me by the Google search, and all the pages high on the
marketing Ginger Factor. Suffice to say I'm clueless about web
marketing/tracking crap, and I really do not have the time now to learn about
stuff that's so foreign to me._

Should I delete this and resubmit it? It's possible to edit the title, but not
the URL, and I can't add any text to the title because of length restrictions.

What would you propose?

 _Added in further edit: I've submitted a version without the tracking code -
I just hope people see that one so I get the comments I was looking for.
Thanks for the responses._

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citricsquid
oh, I see. Well, whomever linked you to the page had a referral link attached.
Reddit has the problem quite frequently, people will submit referral links
under the guise of the content being "interesting" or having some value to
users and then it becomes a game of "is this person genuine or are they
looking to make money?". Ultimately it doesn't really matter that much and
you're a long standing HN user (didn't notice it was you who submitted
this...) so deleting it would probably be overkill, just might make a few
people apprehensive about being gamed.

People share their blog entries and companies and products here all the time
to make money and that's fine but I figure that's because it's transparent
whereas referral links (where the person intentionally used it) are trying to
make money without admitting it. "I made this product..." vs. "This product
looks amazing, what do you think?" the latter is misleading when (intentional)
referral links are involved, because I don't assume by default the person
presenting it is in it for the money.

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samstokes
FYI, the link has a referral tracking code.

Assuming this is a genuine inquiry: I used FreeAgent a couple of years ago
when I was freelance. As a first-time business owner, I found it extremely
valuable. Its design goal of "accountant-speak as the backend, layman's terms
as the frontend" was very effective at simultaneously making bookkeeping easy
and teaching me the fundamentals of accounting.

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ColinWright
See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4828392>

