Archive for August, 2007
In this ongoing series, we’ll demonstrate why FreshBooks is the smarter, faster alternative to small business accounting software.
How to create an invoice: four easy steps
FreshBooks has always been great for e-mail invoicing and time tracking, and this week we unveiled an all-new interface to make things even easier. To highlight our brand new design, we want to show you exactly how to create an invoice, from start to finish.
You can even e-mail the invoice to your client when you’re finished.
Watch how easy it is to create your first invoice!
1. Add yourself to FreshBooks
First, go here and add your company to FreshBooks.
Don’t worry, our free online invoicing service doesn’t have any silly time limits or missing features! We let you try everything at no cost.
Just enter your company name and e-mail address, and you’re ready to get started.
2. Enter your company’s information
The first thing you’ll see is your one-time setup page. This is where you enter the address that will appear on your invoices, and the currency you’ll be working in.
When you’re done, we’ll ask you what you’d like to do first. Go ahead and choose “create a client.”
3. Add your client’s details
Just enter your client’s name and e-mail address, and let us do the rest. If you’d like their mailing address to appear on the invoice, be sure to put that in there, too.
Now go ahead and save your client. We’ll let you know if anything needs to be changed.
Assuming all is well, you’ll immediately be asked what you’d like to do next. Choose “create an invoice,” and you’re nearly finished.
4. Create the invoice
Now for the fun part—getting paid!
Go ahead and enter the charges on the invoice. Each line gets a description, a quantity, and a unit cost, and you can have as many lines as you want. We handle all the math for you, so once you’re done entering the charges, just choose “save as draft” at the bottom of the page.
Take a look at the “print preview,” and voila—
Your first invoice!
How easy was that? Go ahead and print the invoice, because you’re all done.
With one more click, FreshBooks will even e-mail the invoice to your client, or send it to them through the postal service. The choice is yours.
Online invoicing is fast and easy with FreshBooks!
If you’re still creating invoices with Word, Excel, or some enormous accounting package, be sure to try FreshBooks! We’ve already got thousands of happy users, and we’re sure you’ll love it too.
Remember, it’s completely free to try, with no time limits and no missing features. So what are you waiting for? Create an invoice for yourself, and you’ll see just how easy it is.
Happy invoicing!
After countless hours of testing, we’re pleased to announce the total redesign of the FreshBooks interface.
Highlights of the new release include:
- account statements;
- lighter, faster pages;
- a colour picker that is really fun to use;
- support ticketing has received an interface update;
- and again, total interface redesign.
We’ve affectionately named this release “Sexy Beast” (Daniel bought us the cake to celebrate the release… and yes… it’s an ice cream cake).
We’ll be spending today taming the beast (read: squashing any bugs we may have missed in our testing) and generally tweaking things. You can expect more tweaks and improvements in our upcoming release. As always (and since this was such a big release), if you come across something we should investigate, please send us a note. Otherwise, we would love to hear what you think of the new design — please comment below and let us have it.
Quick! To the Batmobile!
Err… well… not exactly… Ben, Sunir and I all entered panel submissions for the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas next March, and we need your help to get those panels approved. I spoke at SXSW last year and the conference was amazing. Austin is a neat town, the conference is well run and the social activities run all the way around the clock.
We’re hoping to take most of the team to the event and we’d love to see you there, but we really need you help to get our panels approved. So please:
- Go to the panel picker.
- Create an account.
- Search for FreshBooks (so you get our panels).
- Vote us in…yeeeaaahhhh!
We need your help, so thanks everyone, and hope to see you in Austin in 2008!
A few years back I spoke with a sales guy at PC World about buying some advertising. Every month since we’ve received a copy of PC World and every month that we do, I am reminded of that sales guy, PC World and buying their advertising. That’s the power of leaving something behind.
We built FreshBooks to help manage our design, development and internet marketing agency. When we ran that business we used to have to present/sell to new clients, frequently at meetings and I know many FreshBooks businesses do the same. Whenever you have the opportunity to present, be sure to leave your prospects with something tangible that reminds them of the value you add. We used to leave a one page sheet of case study summaries. The summaries included the client name and website URL, the percentage amount we helped them improve their online selling capabilities and how long it took for the project to achieve its ROI – usually measured in months. We also included a short testimonial with a contact name who was willing to endorse our services. The summaries were food for thought, demonstrated our value and surely left the prospect pondering what upside they were missing if they did not work with us.
So if you are meeting people, strategize about what you want to leave behind. If you go to a conference, does your business card communicate your value, or does it just offer your contact information? Think about it.
Hello, my name is Heather Villa and I’m the founder and CEO of IAC Professionals. My company is a single source solution for businesses needing help in accounting, taxes, legal, company set-up and administrative services. We have teams of professionals in each functional area and can help a business with one or multiple areas of their organization.
“FreshBooks really is the perfect solution!”
We have offices in Miami and the Dominican Republic and a global base of clients. Because we work virtually, we never hand our clients an invoice. Billing by mail is time consuming and expensive. Morever, without incurring additional expenses, it’s hard to verify delivery. For this reason we made the decision that we would fully commit to electronic billing.
“I earnestly began my search for the perfect online billing solution. Although I found many vendors offering the ‘perfect’ solution, FreshBooks really met our needs.”
I initially started looking for an email certification program. My thought was if I could verify email delivery, all of my problems would be solved. Ha! It wasn’t as easy as I thought and I realized that I had other problems that needed to be solved. In the past six months my company has rapidly expanded. Our international client base has grown significantly creating the need to add staff and space in the Dominican Republic. As I brought in accounting staff to manage data entry, I quickly realized that having accounts receivable and payable on the same system was not going to work.
It was important for me to segregate these key functions. We were also experiencing the very practical difficultly of multiple people needing to work in the same file at the same time. So I earnestly began my search for the perfect online billing solution.
“We have used the system for five months and there have been absolutely no problems!”
Although I found many vendors offering the “perfect” solution, FreshBooks really met our needs. FreshBooks was the only provider to offer a fully functional trial. I tested FreshBooks and two other systems simultaneously for one month. I had to pay for the two other services but I wanted to ensure I was making the right choice.
FreshBooks had three key selling points for me:
- It’s customizable allowing me to add my logo and colors.
- It has a user friendly interface. I don’t have to hunt for things and neither do my clients.
- The time clock is integrated into the billing system.
We have used the system for five months and there have been absolutely no problems! Our clients require no training, they’re able to log on and easily review contracts, pay bills and upload documents. Best of all, I never have to worry about invoice tracking. The automated reminders take one more task off of my busy to-do list. FreshBooks really is the perfect solution!
I hate billing. Or at least I did, until about two weeks ago.
“Before FreshBooks, I frequently spent half an hour or more just creating an invoice.”
Like most graphic designers who freelance, I prefer to spend my time creating attention-getting logos, brochures and websites. Until two weeks ago, invoicing my clients was a tedious task, involving far too many steps, and entirely too much left-brained thinking for my taste. I frequently spent half an hour or more just creating an invoice for a completed project.
I’ve been in business for nearly twenty years and over the past two decades, I’ve used nearly every type of time-tracking and billing tool available. From purpose-built desktop software to expensive online applications, I never found a tool that truly “fit” my workflow, or one that fully integrated project management, estimating, timesheets and billing.
“Over the past two decades, I’ve used nearly every type of time-tracking and billing tool available… I never found a tool that truly ‘fit’ my workflow.”
Most recently, I had been using BaseCamp to manage my projects, iCal to track time, iBiz to generate PDFs of invoices which I then emailed to my clients, with a hand-coded link to PayPal so they could make payments online. This dizzying hybrid of programs and systems still couldn’t provide me with the items I most wanted in my workflow, such as a separate area for my clients to login and track our progress, approve estimates and pay invoices.
When I discovered that FreshBooks integrates with my favorite project management tool, I decided to give it a whirl. I found the interface to be completely intuitive, and in less than five minutes, I had completed the signup process, entered my client’s information and generated my first quote estimate!
“When I discovered that FreshBooks integrates with BaseCamp, I decided to give it a whirl.”
My client emailed me immediately to say how much he enjoyed the ability to approve the quote estimate online. Over the next few days, my client continued to comment on how impressed he was by “our” new billing system, especially the ability to view the real-time progress of our project and hours billed each day.
Since many of our clients still prefer to receive invoices via “snail mail,” I was thrilled to discover that this can be done with a single click in FreshBooks, just as easily as delivering estimates and invoices via email!
“My client continued to comment on how impressed he was by ‘our’ new billing system.”
If there is one lesson that I’ve learned as a designer, it is that a system must be easy to use, or no one will use it, including myself. Beyond merely being functional, it must also offer something for the senses. FreshBooks provides this in the way of extensive customization, allowing me to incorporate my own logo and color scheme, so that my clients enjoy a consistent experience. The only thing that I hope to see in the future is the ability to further customize the fonts used in the already well-thought-out invoices. But I couldn’t be happier with both the overall functionality and feel of FreshBooks!
“We simply couldn’t expand our business without the features that FreshBooks provides. I’m thrilled to have finally found an online time-tracking and invoicing tool that works the way I do.”
I think one of the most innovative features is the Report Card, which will allow me to compare my quarterly billing results with other designers in my industry. I look forward to viewing my results after the next fiscal quarter, and this data will no doubt prove invaluable as I expand my business over the coming months.
After 20 years of “flying solo”, we’ve begun to build a small team of designers and increase our sales and marketing efforts. As our team grows, one of the most critical features for us will be the ability for multiple team members to enter their billable hours from their own homes and offices. We simply couldn’t expand our business without the features that FreshBooks provides. I’m thrilled to have finally found an online time-tracking and invoicing tool that works the way I do, and I’m confident that FreshBooks will continue to scale with our expanding team in the months to come!
We get about a million feature requests each day here at FreshBooks.
(Yes, that’s a highly accurate estimate.)
Most of them sound like, “why don’t you have this feature? So-and-so does it.” Or even better, “why can’t you do this? If you did, I wouldn’t have to use such-and-such anymore.”
Here’s why you should jump for joy each and every time we say “no.”
Read the rest of this entry »
In case you missed it, we re-released the FreshBooks API in late June. Here’s a quick look at what’s happened since:
- Several kind users have contributed Ruby, Perl, and Symfony (PHP) client-libraries that make it easy to integrate with the FreshBooks API.
- Looking to make a quick buck? A number of our customers are hiring developers to help their businesses integrate with FreshBooks via the API. Please check out the developer forums for details.
- Recurring invoicing via the API is on its way. This much requested feature will be included with the next major release of FreshBooks (sneak peek here).
If you’d like to get up-to-the-minute API news, please check out our dedicated FreshBooks API blog.
Earlier this year (February-ish) I switched to Vista Business. When I switched I started using Microsoft’s native spam filtering software. Microsoft’s spam filtering software downloads updates nightly, and for a while it worked fine, but recently I’ve been barraged by spam and I finally snapped. I needed a solution, so I went back to Cloudmark Desktop — the service I had been using for the past four years.
After three days back on Cloudmark I have to admit I don’t know how I survived so long without it. It’s indispensable.
You can have the best customer support staff in the world, but they’ll be terrible at their jobs if you don’t empower them.
A few months ago I had ordered a pair of Klipsch B-3 speakers from BestBuy at 20% off from their online sale. I had selected the online option to pick them up from my local BestBuy. Sadly, a few days later I got an automated email that told me that they were out of stock and I would have to re-order them online.
Since the sale had already ended, I could no longer re-order the speakers at 20% off. I called their customer support and they said that they could process the order again, but they only had control over online orders and could not arrange a pick-up. This would require me to pay extra shipping fee for a mistake on their part. I cancelled my order.
Apparently, their support representatives had no jurisdiction over local pick-ups even though their website allows it. Furthermore they weren’t able to budge on the extra shipping fee they would require me to pay.
Too often then not, I end up calling customer support from company whose support staff can’t help me with my problem. It’s easy to get mad at the customer support representative when you are frustrated, but many times I find that it’s not their fault. Those companies failed to provide them the right tools and empower their staff to actually solve client problems.
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