Archive for April, 2008
My name is Ariel Bernard, and I’m president of DesignByAriel, Inc.. We rely on FreshBooks to keep our business running, our employees organized, and our clients smiling.
“We found FreshBooks in mid-2006 and have been in love ever since.”
Before FreshBooks, we were using four different Web- and desktop-based tools to achieve the same results. Our clients were confused, billing was time-consuming, and projects were slow to start. The bottom line was our clients wanted a solution that was easy and efficient.
Our primary requirement for selecting a new accounting and invoicing solution was something Web-based. It was the 21st century and so few of the options were in Web-based billing. We’re a Web company, with employees and contractors all over the United States. We needed a Web solution for billing that worked.
We found FreshBooks in mid-2006 and have been in love ever since. Our clients find it easy, and our staff enjoy the efficiency of the time tracking and expense recording.
If we had to choose one feature that is truly groundbreaking, it would have to be one-click invoice mailing. We spent so much time in the past preparing monthly invoicing. Now we can send out 50 invoices in five minutes. Beat that, QuickBooks!
“There is nothing like getting to your desk on Monday to see that more than half of the invoices sent have been paid over the weekend by credit card.”
Payment is second on our favorites list. We find over 80% of our clients prefer to pay with a credit card. Our clients like to handle issues at their leisure; with FreshBooks, they can settle their entire account balance at 4am on a Lufthansa flight using their MasterCard. There is nothing like getting to your desk at 8am on Monday to see that more than half of the invoices sent have been paid over the weekend by credit card.
FreshBooks is much more than billing, we also drive our entire support ticket system through the same service. There are many Web-based support ticket systems out there, but if you want your clients to actually use the system you put in place, we’ve found that a consolidated service is the only way to go. In our opinion, FreshBooks is the best all-in-one solution available.
Since 2003, we’ve been developing innovative websites, interactive web-applications, forward-thinking branding solutions, and much more. With FreshBooks as part of our arsenal, we’re billing, support, and client-management gurus, too.
Back in February, FreshBooks had the honour of speaking at Third Tuesday hosted by Joseph Thornley of Thornley Fallis. Pretty early in the presentation I think Mike and I we could tell that this was going to be a special night because the crowd was incredible, the questions were really thoughtful and there was just a great vibe in the room.
Mr. Thornley must have agreed because he has started posting clips of that evening over on his Pro PR blog and we couldn’t be happier to share it with all of you!
Here is one of the three videos posted now and there will be more going up at Pro PR in the days and weeks to come!
Yes I know the videos are a bit hard to see but if you close your eyes you can pretend you were there and see why we had so much fun at this appearance!
…And if you found any of this interesting and would like to see it “LIVE” we will be doing this event again in June for Third Tuesday Ottawa!
[Editor's note: apologies for all the exclamation marks, but Saul makes an excellent point: "they're prettier than periods."]
Recently the Silicon Valley Insider reported Blaine Cook, Lead Architect of Twitter has left Twitter. I interviewed Blaine at FOWA 2008 (as well as Leah Culver, Matt Mullenweg and the guys from Wufoo, amongst others) and I was taken aback by what a nice, down-to-earth guy Blaine is.
There is a bit of a brushfire burning in the blogosphere today about Blaine’s leaving Twitter. Some people are faulting him for Twitter’s spotty uptime, all I know is that I’ve noticed a pile of issues since he left.
In this interview we talk about scaling Twitter and the demands that come with that responsibility, among other things:
P.S., we’ll be posting more videos in the coming weeks and months.
Got a poem about FreshBooks? If so, you’re not the only one.
Aaron started a thread in the forum this morning:
Time for a contest.
Write a poem on billing;
Win a free t-shirt.
If I can come up with that rockin’ haiku in less than thirty seconds, I have full faith you can all do much, much better than me. So write me a poem on billing, and post it in the topic below. My favourite ones get FreshBooks t-shirts.
17 entries so far. Feel free to chime in!
FreshBooks got a nice mention in the Financial Post this weekend about how we’re helping to green businesses. There is more about our history in the article, but this is my favourite part:
Perhaps FreshBooks’ biggest environmental impact is the greening of other businesses in 100 countries. “We are empowering people to work from home or remote locations, so less travel is involved. The feedback we get on our blog, is ‘the best thing I’ve done to green my business is I’ve stopped driving to work.’ “
This is a really exciting aspect of what FreshBooks does — we enable an emerging class of service-oriented professionals who choose to work more independently and more remotely than has been known before, and we’re honoured and humbled to be supporting them in this way.
Alistair Croll just wrote a post over at GigaOM talking about the increasing irrelevance of source code:
For a long time, source code was viewed as a software company’s crown jewels, protected by dongles and complex encryption schemes to prevent copying and theft. In the software-as-a-service world, however, source code becomes irrelevant…If 37 Signals gave me the Basecamp source code for free, I’d still use their service. If Freshbooks burned me a copy of their app, I’d still subscribe to them. Even if Salesforce.com handed me their software, I’d use their hosted portal.
This is *so* true. As he rightly points out, “IT administrators will tell you that the cost of running any application far exceeds its license fees” and this is a big part of why Software as a Service (SaaS) is increasingly appealing.
When you consider the true costs and complexities of ongoing maintenance, release patching, backup management and training (which companies like FreshBooks deliver happily, and with a far deeper knowledge than any IT department ever could), you begin to see the true value of SaaS, and it’s clearly not just the source code.
In the spirit of continuous learning, knowledge sharing and free lunch, we’ve started a weekly Lunch and Learn series here at FreshBooks headquarters, where folks take a moment or two to talk about stuff they’ve been working on, or just flat out explain what they do to the rest of the company.
My experience is that marketing and development don’t always totally understand each other, and nothing’s more important than making sure people are on the same page, and clear on their respective contributions that move the company forward.
To address these knowledge gaps, we have “Lunch and Learn” (coined by Rich, and surely pilfered from an HR department in a far-off land).
Today Ben was good enough to lead us through an ingenious database manipulating tool designed and implemented here at FreshBooks that he’s dubbed FORM. Needless to say, most of the marketing guys (Mitch and Saul I’m looking at you!) still don’t understand what our crack developers are up to, yet they’re already hard at work figuring out how to market it.
Littlelines is a small, friendly development team consisting of clean design and top notch coding.
Well okay, that’s the text from our homepage. Behind the scenes, we’re two brothers who have teamed up to create awesome websites. One is a designer — the other is a developer. We think it’s a good match.
Who are you?
Matt Sears is a software developer with over eight years of experience in developing applications for the Web. Prior to Littlelines, Matt was Technical Lead at LexisNexis, a global online search engine for legal and business documents. There he led large and small teams on enterprise application development projects.
Josh Sears entered the professional world as a Graphic Designer for Scott Hull Associates, the country’s top artist agency. There he honed his skills for a half decade until finally he was considered an equal of the nation’s top artists and designers.
Josh’s work has been celebrated in such publications as HOW Magazine, Print, 3X3, and honoured by associations such as American Illustrators and Graphic Design USA.
What do you do?
Simply put, we make clean, user-friendly websites.
What was business like before FreshBooks?
Honestly? We didn’t have a business before FreshBooks. It was one of our first choices when we started the company due to the fact that we wanted a simple, intuitive process of invoicing our clients.
What is business like with FreshBooks?
Things are going great. The system is easy and pain-free. Payments have arrived smoothly and everyone seems happy. We couldn’t be happier.
So, you’re sitting there trying to decide how to finish your tax return without all the information you’re missing or not sure of, right?
Well, take a breath – and get an extension.
Your tax software service can probably do it online. If not – use Form 4868.
If you have a partnership or LLC filing as a partnership, or an estate (Form 1041) or trust (Form 1041), use IRS Form 7004.
The extensions are automatically accepted – no approval needed. Good for 6 months.
BUT, if you owe money, you need to pay. Drop by TaxWatch article at MarketWatch.com (it’s written by me) for tips on how to pay – especially if you don’t have money right now. In fact, read it BEFORE you finalize your tax return. You’re going to find one last way to cut last year’s taxes. But only if you put your tax return on extension.
Oh, let me dispell a rumor I just heard about extensions and the Stimulus Rebates. Some fool is spreading the rumor that you won’t get your rebate if you put your return on extension. That’s utter nonsense. You’ll get it. Perhaps a bit later. But it will come.
Happy Tax Day!
Anytime there is a platform shift, the market benefits from transitional services.
Lately there has been a bit of interest in how FreshBooks helps businesses green their business processes. For the most part we help businesses use less paper, but FreshBooks has a green impact in other ways too.
Let’s start with how FreshBooks reduces paper. First, and most obviously, by enabling FreshBookers to email invoices, that’s a big savings right there. You might argue that our snail mail service promotes more paper usage, but I see that differently. Why? Because we help people transition from sending all their invoices by mail to sending no paper based invoices – or next to none.
That’s just invoices, how else do we save paper? If you send estimates/quotes with FreshBooks, your clients can accept them and we’ll even time-stamp them for you. This saves your client the hassle of sending an approval by fax with a signature. Our time tracking service (please pardon the ancient UI) and expense tracking service cuts down on paper time sheets and expense reports for employees, while our support ticketing system cuts down on formal work orders over the phone, work on a note pad and manual order taking.
All in all that saves million of pages a year, but I’d say the biggest impact is more indirect. FreshBooks is a transitional service in that we enable people to work remotely, work from home and/or telecommute more effectively . The consequence of this is less driving of cars, and when you cobble together all the kilometers of driving the entire FreshBooks community, the impact is significant. It’s also another great example of how FreshBooks is a transitional service that is helping people move from the traditional “work in the big old office setting”, to working outside of it.
That’s potent stuff; we’re very proud of it.
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