What dietitians need from their software, from sources outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa:
Disclosure: Nexa's maker publishes this page, so weigh it accordingly. We have not tested either product with dietitians. The practice requirements below come from Medicare Part B rules and state licensing law, and the product facts come from each vendor's own listed features. FreshBooks covers the general billing job well. It has professional invoice templates, built-in time tracking, a client portal, a mobile app and a design for non-accountants. Plus adds accountant access, bank reconciliation and receipt scanning. Support is free by phone and email during the trial, and there is a 30-day no-card trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Watch the client caps: Lite covers 5 billable clients and Plus covers 50. Archived clients count, and only deleting a client frees a slot, so a growing caseload can push you onto an unlimited-client plan. What FreshBooks lists nothing for is this trade's compliance work. Medicare Part B covers medical nutrition therapy only for beneficiaries with diabetes or renal disease: three hours in the first year and two in later years. A physician can order extra hours when the condition, diagnosis or treatment regimen changes. Medical nutrition therapy and diabetes self-management training can share an episode of care but not a date of service. A practice therefore has to track hours used per patient per year, physician orders and same-day conflicts. Many states also require a licence, so it must track licence status and renewal state by state. FreshBooks has none of this.
Nexa has the same gap, and we don't count it as an advantage. Its feature list has no hours counter, no physician-order record, no same-day service check and no licence tracking. Its CRM notes and tags could hold a hand-kept tally, but that is a manual workaround, and a missed entry would go unflagged. What Nexa does have is general: invoices, estimates and proposals that convert to invoices, payment plans, a client pay portal on your own Stripe account, a booking page with intake forms and reschedule and cancel links, time tracking, and bookkeeping with bank reconciliation and receipt scanning. It has no QuickBooks or Xero sync and no Google Calendar sync (calendar export is an .ics file). It sends no text messages. Its automated emails and reminders send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. It is software you own and run yourself, with no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding. That matters for the roughly 9 percent of dietitians and nutritionists who are self-employed and do their own admin.
Over three years, FreshBooks at $43 a month costs $1,548 ($516 a year). Nexa is $279 once (or 3 payments of $99), or $458.64 over three years with optional Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month. The saving is real, but it applies only to invoicing, booking and bookkeeping, and neither tool does the work that carries regulatory risk. So the first job is a separate clinical-practice or compliance-tracking tool. For each patient it should keep hours used per year, the physician order and date for any extra hours, and the date and type of each service, so a same-day MNT and DSMT pairing is flagged. For each state it should keep licence status and renewal date. If you use FreshBooks and rely on its support, mobile app or accountant access, keep it. If you want one-time pricing, are comfortable running your own software and don't need those, Nexa can handle the billing. Either way, the billing tool is the smaller decision.
Our read for dietitians: Neither tool tracks Medicare MNT hours, physician orders, same-day service conflicts or state licences, so add a dedicated clinical-practice or compliance-tracking tool and keep whichever billing tool you already use.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs dietitians $516/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 6.5 months it has cost less than FreshBooks, and you own it after that. What it is not: hosted-for-you software with a support desk and a roadmap you can lobby. That is the trade, and the rest of this page is the detail behind it.
Nexa is $279 once, about $23 a month over its first year. Its Drain Guard reads your expenses (from a linked bank, an imported statement, or ones you type in), finds the charges that repeat, and adds them up by the month. Keep or Cut then walks you through them one at a time. Cancel $23 a month of charges you'd forgotten about and Nexa has paid for itself inside the first year, before you count the FreshBooks bill you'd stop paying.
It depends on what you find and what you cancel, so we don't promise a number. In our demo data, Drain Guard finds 5 subscriptions adding up to $110.13 a month. That is sample data, not a customer's.
The verdict for dietitians: Neither FreshBooks nor Nexa is the main system for this work; start with software built for it. Nexa only makes sense beside it, at $279 once against $1,548 for FreshBooks over three years.
Scheduling, client records, invoicing and time tracking are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
None of that is a software problem you can buy your way out of in one click — it is why the tool you pick matters more than what it costs. FreshBooks solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
Today's list price is $43/month — $516 a year, from FreshBooks's own pricing page. Every figure below is that price, multiplied. Nothing is projected.
Nexa: $279 once (or 3 × $99). Over the same three years, that is $1,269 less.
If FreshBooks raises its price, the three-year cost goes up; if it cuts it, the cost comes down. We don't guess which. Add-ons, extra seats and card-processing fees are not included, on either side.
| Feature | FreshBooks | Nexa |
|---|---|---|
| Invoicing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scheduling | ✗ | ✓ |
| CRM | ✗ | ✓ |
| Time Tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Full Accounting | ✓ | ✓ (SIMPL) |
| Task Management | — | ✓ |
| Works offline | — | ✓ |
| Price | $43/mo | $279 once or 3 × $99 |
| 3-Year Total | $1,548 | $279 |
| You own it? | No — stop paying, lose access | Yes — forever |
✓ and ✗ for FreshBooks come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as FreshBooks lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
Straight from FreshBooks's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
FreshBooks is the better call if you need very user-friendly for non-accountants specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
FreshBooks says it is "perfect for everyone from self-employed professionals to growing business owners." It lists four audiences: freelancers, solopreneurs, businesses with employees, and businesses with contractors. (freshbooks.com)
What people outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa say:
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Software doesn't do the actual work — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every dietitian: find the work, manage it, bill for it, get paid. Each step has a tool — and the right single tool runs the whole loop, so the handoffs are automatic and you get back to the actual work. Tap a step to see what gets automated.
An inquiry becomes a proposal becomes a signed engagement — the terms and the retainer set.
The work you're paid for — with the hours, tasks, and expenses tracked against the engagement instead of reconstructed at month-end.
The work becomes the invoice — the hours, the add-ons, the materials, the deposit credited — totaled and sent, instead of re-typed at 9pm.
Paid by card or link, the deposit credited, and what's overdue chased — without you doing it by hand.
You can stitch four separate subscriptions across these four steps, or run one tool that does the whole flow so a booking becomes a job becomes an invoice becomes a payment without re-typing. Either way the goal is the same: less time on the business of the business, more on the actual work. (Nexa is built to be the one — but the honest options for each step are above and below.)
This is the connection that makes the rest worth it. A dietitian's job already holds the services, the hours, the add-ons, and the materials — so the invoice builds itself from the work instead of you re-typing it at 9pm. Toggle an add-on or nudge the hours and watch it recompute.
You didn't write this invoice — the job did.
FreshBooks plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median dietitian earns $50,000/year. At $516/year, FreshBooks is a recurring slice of that — paid again every year, whether the year was good or not. Owning the same jobs outright is $279 once, and the slice stops.
Nexa is $279 once. Invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, accounting — all connected, built for dietitians. You own it like you own your Nutrition analysis software.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small dietitians business that owns its tools and is sick of renting software, Nexa replaces your whole stack for $279 once. If you're scaling into a large team with dedicated admin staff, a bigger platform may fit better — and we'd rather tell you that now than sell you the wrong thing.
Your people are already online — swapping real numbers, tool picks, and war stories. Here's where to find them.
Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Scheduling, client records, invoicing and time tracking are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
Most of my clients come to me with a diagnosis or a goal: diabetes, high blood pressure, digestive problems, pregnancy, weight or an athlete wanting to perform better. The first appointment is an hour of assessment: medical history and lab results, medications, what they actually eat on a normal day, their schedule, budget and cooking skills, because a plan they can't follow is useless. From that I build recommendations and a practical plan, often starting with two or three changes rather than a complete overhaul. Follow-up sessions track progress, adjust the plan and deal with what got in the way. Everything is documented, and for clients with medical conditions I coordinate with their doctor. Many of my clients' visits are covered by insurance, which means verifying benefits, getting referrals where required, submitting claims and handling denials; others pay privately or in packages. I stay current with research and complete continuing-education credits to keep my credential and licence. Some weeks include a workshop for a local employer or a talk at a community centre.
Real dietitians near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a dietitian? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every dietitian on Nexa →
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
You paid for these once because good tools last. That's the bar your software should clear too — priced like a tool you own, $279 once, not a subscription that costs more than your kit every year.
We build a dietitian's guide the same way every time, and we'd rather you trust it than take it on faith. Nexa is our product, so the test we hold ourselves to is simple: a tool only "wins" a job here when it genuinely does that job better for a dietitian — and where something free, open-source, or buy-once does it better, we say so and link you to it. Where Nexa falls short (payroll is the honest example), we name the alternative outright.
Found something out of date? Prices change and we don't catch every move the day it happens. This guide is published and maintained by the Nexa team; if a figure here is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — getting it right matters more to us than the sale.
For solo dietitians and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. FreshBooks may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
FreshBooks has features like Very user-friendly for non-accountants and Built-in time tracking that some businesses rely on. For most solo dietitians, these aren't dealbreakers.
At $43/month, Nexa pays for itself in 6.5 months. After that: $516 saved every year.
Yes. Nexa is $279 as a one-time payment, or 3 payments of $99 ($297 total). Either way it's a one-time purchase — no subscription, no recurring fees ever.
Own your tools. Stop renting your software.
Get Nexa — $279 Once