July 1st is Canada Day in….well…Canada. 

As you likely know, it’s six Canadians who run FreshBooks.  So…on behalf of all of us, play safe and have a great weekend.  We won’t be available Monday - we’re taking the day off (it’s a national holiday here) to enjoy the great weather we’ve been having and reward ourselves for all the hard work we do for you - our users.

For those of you who are Canadian FreshBooks users (that’s about 10% everyone), don’t forget to change your GST rate to 6% from 7%.  Levi and Daniel spent today adjusting our recurring charges to all our Canadian users.  So if you are Canadian, you’ll be getting a 1% discount from here on in - or at least it might seem that way

Again, have a great weekend.

To all our Canadian users:
Before you head out for some fun this long weekend, don’t forget that the GST rate will change from 7% to 6% as of July 1st 2006. 

You can read instructions on how to update your system in my earlier blog post.
Have a great long weekend!

Fritz and Stephen, those talented experimenters from EepyBird.com, will be appearing on Late Night with David Letterman (along with Kate Bosworth and Broken Social Scene) tonight at 11:30pm ET.

If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look at the magic reproduction of the Bellagio Fountain they create with 200 litres of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints (3 minutes).

The two companies have responded very differently to the (free) publicity this has generated. You’ll find the video available right on Mento’s home page, but sadly nowhere to be found on Coke’s site - not even under the “Fun” links! Dudes, lighten up

Since we provide an online invoicing tool that integrates with a number of payment gateways to help you collect credit card payments online, we often get calls asking for a recommended gateway to use.  Our answer is always dependent on the needs of the caller.  Our questions are usually:

• Do you process a large number of transactions per month?
• Do you want to accept eChecks or ACH payments?
• Are you based in the US?
• Do you already have an internet merchant account?

From these answers we can usually recommend someone to call for a quote.  Out of curiosity, I ran some statistics to determine who were the most popular credit card gateways (this excludes PayPal and 2Checkout):

Authorize.net is the clear winner in the popularity contest.  This indicates it may be the best payment gateway solution for a small business services company based in the US. 

For those of us based in Canada, PSiGate is the winner, although their only competition is a company that used to be called Paradata, but was recently purchased by Payment Processing, Inc.