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.
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5:43 pm
I’ll take options 1 and 3.
I really need to solve time tracking, and that “solution” is some kind of desktop widget (in the Vista Sidebar, maybe).
Part 3 is online billing. The particular site I want to handle it for sells susbscriptions, and has about 1500 subscribers. I think Freshbooks might prove to be too expensive for their particular needs, but a nice API would certainly make it an option.
6:44 pm
Hrm, actually, after looking at it I was wrong about pricing. It would be pretty easy to sell the site on using it for the prices you’re charging.
The only thing I’d need is some kind of two way API. People need to be able to sign up, and Freshbooks needs to fire off provisioning on our end.
11:43 pm
It would be nice for our users to authenticate against the freshbooks database. It would need to either be a radius protocol or a plugin that could possibly go in freeradius?
being able to authenticate pppoe against freshbooks would keep our customers from needing muliple passwords.
5:21 pm
I currently track time for my business partner and myself in iCal. Once the API supports timesheets, I plan to write an ics parser that can slurp my iCal files into Freshbooks. I currently use an iOpus iMacros script to do this, but it’s a less than ideal solution.
12:02 am
Hi Ben,
Great to hear more work is being done on the Freshbooks API and I like your name by the way. I am in need of using the staff login and password to be used by the API. At the moment you can only use the admin login and this restricts me from separating out the invoice per staff member.
Kind Regards,
Ben
5:35 am
Hi Ben
Congrats on you successful start with the implementation for Ruby and I whish you all the best at Freshbooks and success with broadening the API
Goran
4:57 pm
Lets get a move on, Ben. The presure is building… i have been patiently waiting for the API updates for more than a year… BTW Welcome to the show.
Paul
5:35 pm
Not long now Paul…not long at all.
4:31 pm
Is there any standalone software out there that is already developed that would allow me to record payments received without having to log into the Freshbooks website? We transact a large number of monthly invoices (both by check and credit card) and it would make life easy if something like this was out there. I love your site and we really rely on you guys!
4:39 pm
Dan - the API will grant access to that data, so we’re expecting there will be a tool soon.
12:52 pm
[...] API developer, I realize I’m playing with fire here. We’re weeks away from releasing our new-and-improved FreshBooks API, and someone could be writing the very same about us [...]