Ripe Data – the January 07 Edition

This is the third edition of Ripe Data. What’s Ripe Data? It’s a monthly series we’re going to be doing on the FreshBooks Blog and it is an assortment and analysis of various metrics we track here at FreshBooks. Please note, Ripe Data will not include the valuable industry benchmarks active FreshBooks users will have access to in 2007. With that said, enjoy.

For companies who accept online payments:
- In December, 14.7% of payments were accepted online
- In January, 17.0% of payments were accepted online

Analysis
This is a fairly significant month over month increase in the number of people who choose to pay their invoices online as opposed to sending payments via check. It looks like people are overcoming the holiday season cash flow issues which likely caused the drop in online payments we saw last month.

Payment Methods:
- Visa: 16.5% in December, 15.5% in January
- Mastercard: 7.7% in December, 7.6% in January
- Amex: 4.2% in December, 4.19% in January
- Paypal: 5.6% in December, 6.5% in January
- Other (including check, cash, account credit, etc.): 65.9%% in December, 66.3% in January

Analysis
It’s hard to account for such significant growth for PayPal over a one month period. Whether it speaks to market penetration for them, or it’s just an anomoly remains to be seen, but I suspect the trend towards more use of PayPal over time will continue – it’s a great service.

For companies that send invoices by both email and by ground mail:
- In December, 95.9% of invoices were sent by email and 4.1% were sent by ground mail.
- In January 95.9% of invoices were sent by email and 4.1% were sent by ground mail.

Analysis
Since our August snail mail release, in which we introduced the ability to send invoices through the US Post, we have seen increases in the percentage of invoices sent by ground mail climb every month. Despite the fact that the number held in January, I believe that this trend towards more invoices being sent throught our ground mail service will continue in 2007 until a balance is reached (the numbers did trend upwards again when you move out another decimal place).

Browser Usage:
- Internet Explorer 7 – December 15.42%, January 20.40%
- IE 6 – December 34.78%, January 37.28%
- FireFox 2.0 – December 21.85%, January 1.06%
- FF 1.5 – December 17.61%, January 12.56%

Analysis
Alarming for the Firefox community. Microsoft IE 7 has stolen significant market share from Firefox over each of the last three months.

Operating System Usage
-Windows – December 86.97%, January 88.85%
-Macintosh – December 10.27%, January 9.04%
-Linux – December 2.09%%, January 1.54%
-Unix – December 0.06%, January 0.07%

Analysis
This is the second straight month of Windows growth and it may be an early sign that the market is experimenting with Microsoft VISTA, but time will tell.

Conclusion
That’s all for now folks.