Now We’re a Platform

by Mike McDerment - August 22/2006

Now FreshBooks is truly a billing platform. Why are we a billing platform? With the release of our API, businesses can leverage the benefits of FreshBooks and integrate FreshBooks into that existing process in much the same way as businesses use Salesforce’s App Force to leverage SalesForce.

A major benefit of FreshBooks is it helps business transition their receivables process from the offline to the online world. If you are an alarm service with 5,000 clients, it likely costs you $3,000-$4,000/month to send your invoices in the mail. If those same clients received their invoices electronically, that would save you $3,000/month or $40,000-50,000/year and speed up collections. The problem is it’s hard to smoothly transition your clients from receiving invoices by post to receiving them online. That is where FreshBooks comes in. By leveraging the FreshBooks API businesses can leverage the FreshBooks platform and transition your customers smoothly. Don’t build your own solution – it’s risky. Instead, build on a proven platform.

We are about to release Ground Mail and API support for it. We will soon be releasing version II of our API. It will make developers more powerful. We hope you will build on this platform – go ahead and get started.

Sep 19/06
6:16 pm

API version 1.13 says:

[...] With the introduction of our new ground mail feature, we have made a small update to our API. If you are not familiar with our API, you can read more about the FreshBooks platform here. You can now send invoices via ground mail using the API as well as normal email invoices. Documentation of the new feature is available on page 15. Currently our API allows you to create clients as well as create and send invoices outside of FreshBooks. We have received a lot of requests to add recurring billing to our API, and that is a feature we plan to add for our next big API release, so stay tuned. [...]

Nov 7/06
2:16 pm

FreshBooks Reaches One Hundred Thousand Users says:

[...] Next we released a service that allows our users to send their invoices, not just by email, but via first class mail through the US Post. Our partner sends over one billion pieces of mail a year. We receive our invoices in two or three days in our Toronto office. They seem to take about four days to get the United Kingdom. We also updated our API and added the capability to send ground mail invoices through the US Post via our API so businesses could leverage our billing platform and integrate with their existing systems and processes. [...]