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!