Hey everyone, Ben here. I’ve been working nearly a month now at FreshBooks, and Mike felt it was about time for my inaugural blog post. I thought I’d mark the occasion with a couple of updates on the FreshBooks API.

Before starting here, I’d actually written a Ruby wrapper for the current version of the FreshBooks API. It’s hands-down the easiest way to integrate with your FreshBooks account, plus it’s free for anyone to use and modify. If you’ve got some experience in Ruby, you might want to check it out.

Based on my work in this area, I’m pretty stoked to announce the team has put me in charge of continued development on the FreshBooks API. If you’re interested in working with the API, whether it’s to build a 3rd party time tracking widget, a wrapper like mine in PHP, or to use FreshBooks as a back-end billing engine, I’d like to hear from you. I think the more communication we have, the better it’ll turn out for everyone.

So that’s it – short and sweet. It was all business today, so I’ll be sure to throw some office shenanigans into my next post to balance things out.

Last night members of the FreshBooks team donned the FreshBooks tees and climbed the CN Tower for a good cause: the WWF and the fight against global warming.

We had a final donation amount of $585.00 (but it’s not too late to add to that), we also had a strong performance in the climb with our team average at 14:21. The veterans Joe and Levi had impressive times pushing themselves to try and beat last years time. Joe clocked in at 12:21 and Levi at 12:25. Naama (Levi’s fiancée) did awesome for her second time out and just missed her goal of breaking 15 minutes with a time of 15:11. And I did well in my first time out with a time of 17:25. For results on the overall top performers visit the CN Tower climb website.

It was a fun night and we are all looking forward to next year where we will hopefully have two FreshBooks teams out.

UPDATE:
The team times are in! FreshBooks places 2nd! View the results here.

Something I have taken an interest in over the last couple of years is product reinvention. I’ve been thinking about this lately because of something Triscuits has done. I grew up in a Triscuits household. Two things we ALWAYS had in stock when I was growing up were granola and Triscuits. Don’t ask…my friends used to tease me about this because it was something that never failed. Anyway…take a look at Triscuits. All they have done over the last ten years is change the amount of salt and sodium in their product – that’s incredible boring if you ask me. But look at Triscuits now…

Just recently I have come across two new ingenious variations of their crackers: Rosemary and Olive Oil (which is awesome), and Cracked Pepper and Olive Oil (which is even better…I can’t believe how good these taste).

These new offerings have totally reinvigorated how Triscuits are positioned in my mind. Sadly I went to their website to learn more and find links to point to in this post and was utterly disappointed by the uselessness of their marketing collateral…no dedicated pages for each new product, links that are confusing, hard to find and, in some cases, barely work. Classic flash driven advertising agency approach to usability…no wonder ad agencies are in trouble these days. And to top it off, Nabisco has not domain-proofed their brand by buying Triscuits.com. But I digress…

Despite all that, if you are a Triscuits fan, it’s time to go shopping. And may I recommend some Brie cheese with the Cracked Pepper and Olive Oil for your delight? Happy snacking.

Just wanted to let you know that we are closing the FreshBooks office two hours early today for an all-hands meeting, and then some snacks and libations. So… as of 4 PM EST today we will not be available by phone or email or in the forum, as we are meeting to spend some quality time with one another. We will resume our regular hours of exceptional customer support starting tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM, continuing until 6:00 PM as usual. All-hands meetings will be a monthly affair at FreshBooks from here on out. We hope you have a lovely evening and thank you in advance for your understanding.

Warm regards,

—The Fresh Folks

P.S. We are still on the hunt for a full time designer to help us get more done. If you know someone with real talent and a willingness to live in Toronto, please contact us. Thanks.