Here at FreshBooks we’re having our annual Halloween costume contest. Ok, this is actually the first year of the contest and hey, we are all pretty psyched about it. We were going to decide the winner by an internal staff vote at first but then we decided to open it up to the public. So in the words of GaNgSta Grace, time to get your vote on by letting us know who has the illest costume in this shizzle. Simply add a comment below. Don’t be shy, every vote counts.
Hey folks. Well, it’s not quite Hallowe’en yet, but here at the FreshBooks World Headquarters, we’re getting a jump on the holiday and we thought you’d get a kick out of this. Taavi and I came in on the weekend with a can of spray paint and a defenseless Bondi iMac and today the FreshBooks office is now properly festive for Hallowe’en with our new iMac-O-Lantern!
Boo!
We got the idea from this awesome Instructables article. Today somebody went and added a FreshBooks leaf to our newest little orange friend, so he’s properly branded.
The face changes every twenty minutes (I made them with OmniGraffle), using the JPEGView application described in the Instructables article. Here are some shots of the process:
Primed and Ready to Go!
Painting the iMac's bottom. He does look pretty helpless, doesn't he? Poor little guy.
Just awaiting the peeling of the tape -- the most exciting part of the whole process!
And there you have it! Unfortunately, the iMac is kind of noisy — it emits a peculiar sort of high-pitched whine — and it’s right beside poor Rich’s head, so either Rich is going to go insane or we’ll have to move it. We still haven’t decided which will be more fun.
How are you dressing up your office for Hallowe’en?
If you are a product company, and you have users, feature requests can become overwhelming. Folks write on our forums all the time, coming up with great suggestions for how to improve FreshBooks. It’s a key part of our business to have this sort of consistent ongoing feedback from our customers.
But as we’ve grown, the pace of incoming requests has far outstripped our ability to execute on them, and so folks are being presented again and again with the standard reply: “We’ll pass that on to our developers.”
I know that sounds like, “Shut up and go away,” but when Grace or Randy or whoever say that to you, they’re actually doing what they say, and I thought you’d appreciate seeing how that works.
We’ve built a custom tool to help us manage feature reqeusts, which is kind of weird since it’s a problem virtually every software company runs into, but nobody has a tool that does just what we wanted done.
What we wanted done was to track incoming requests and be able to accurately assess how many people are asking for them through ALL our communication channels. This is where a lot of “crowd-sourcing” tools fall down — they focus on just one channel. But we wanted to be able to track phone calls, forum posts and emails, as well as our own staff votes for particular items. So now we have such a tool. I’m not always super-imaginative about this sort of stuff and it was my project, so I’ve called it The Big List.
The Big List is just what it sounds like — an enormous list of feature requests, prioritized by two things: how many people ask for them and by how important we think they are. We only implemented the big list a few weeks ago and it’s pretty cool. Here’s a peek at a typical feature: a request to manage partial payments on FreshBooks invoices:
You can see on the right hand side that this entry records nine forum posts about this issue (I know there’s more out there; we haven’t finished entering all the information for this entry yet), no phone calls and thirteen “RT” tickets (yeah, presently we use RT for support issue tracking), and that no staff members have yet voted for it yet. Nine plus none plus thirteen plus none equals twenty-two, which is what the big number twenty-two on the other side of the screen means.
You can also see Myleen added a helpful comment — it tells us that this request is being worked on and that link goes to our work tracking system. (NOTE: we actually rolled this out last week) So if somebody wants to check in with the developer who’s working on this item, they can just follow that link and see the progress. Myleen’s helpful; that’s just one reason we love her so much.
Up in the top right you can see a cheerful button that says “Bump!” — folks can use that to arbitrarily adjust the priority value (currently 22) for the entry. Sometimes we know the priority for a request is high but we don’t have the time to comb through the forums and emails to find references, so this lets us pop something up quickly.
You can see the actual content here is pretty simple; this is a record of stuff folks are asking for, not a complete development spec. If we decide to implement this, there’s a ton of design work we’ll have to do, but we’re not worrying about that now. We don’t need that much detail to know how to prioritize this, and that’s what this stage of the game is all about.
I hope that makes it a little easier to hear “We’ll pass that on to our developers,” and I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse “behind the curtain” to see how we get things done here at FreshBooks.
Can I get a woot woot? You’ve been asking us for an iPhone application for a while. We were delightfully surprised to learn our free iPod Touch and iPhone Time Tracking application was approved by Apple at midnight last night! (Search for “FreshBooks” in the iTunes App Store.)
Just like our Mac OS X Dashboard widget, you can track time in FreshBooks against projects and tasks, and you can keep notes for each time entry. You can also manually edit the time by clicking on the clock.
The best part, though, is we took our time to build this for a phone. You can enter or leave the application at will, and the timer will keep running while you’re doing other things with your iPhone. Better yet, the timer keeps track of your time whether you are online or offline. It queues up submitted time entries until you’re next online and capable of submitting them to FreshBooks.
We went golfing Friday afternoon. To keep things interesting on the course (at least when Grace was not climbing trees) we played “one putt poker”. One putt poker works like this:
1. At the start of the round everyone is dealt two cards.
2. Every time you “one putt” a green, you earn another card. Less experienced golfers got two putts.
3. At the end of the round, the person with the best poker hand wins.
This game is great when you have people with wildly different levels of experience on the golf course, and on Friday, only about half the team had ever played golf before. Congrats to Dan W for bringing home the title.
When we were done, we had this photo taken. Sadly we were missing Daniel, Mitch, Asmita, Saul, and Sunir, but I thought I’d share this shot with you nonetheless.
We’ve long heard about how hard it is to tell which invoices have been partially paid – and how much is outstanding – when you are looking at your list of invoices. Today we’ve added a new status to invoices called “partial” which indicates part of the invoice has been paid. We’ve also implemented a tidy little rollover effect (check out the screen shot) so that you can quickly see how much is outstanding and how much was paid.
Thanks for all the feedback and we hope you enjoy this little tweak.
Building a company requires great people, but where do you find them, and how do you get them in the door? Whether you are planning on hiring one, two or even twenty people in the next few months, what follows is a little bit of collected wisdom garnered from hiring for Freshbooks.
That’s how Zoe opened a feature article she wrote for ThinkVitamin titled: Hire the Best People: 10 easy steps. If you are looking to build a great team, go on over and give it a read.
Today we are announcing the release of quarterly industry benchmarks on an aggregate of all FreshBooks users as well as a handful of the more popular FreshBooks users’ industries.
We’re releasing these benchmarks because the professionals that FreshBooks serves do not have access to the kind of performance information most other industries take for granted. The service oriented professionals that FreshBooks serves – web designers, copy writers, dog walkers, management consultants, magicians, interior designers, ISPs, computer technicians – can’t go to places like Dun and Bradstreet and buy a report about their industry. Even if they did, they’d find the metrics covered to be mostly useless to their way of evaluating the day to day performance of their business, so I’m hopeful that business owners will use this data to steer their business in the right direction in any kind of weather.
For those of you who are familiar with FreshBooks, you may know our report card service (a different, more detailed and account specific service) gives FreshBooks account holders a quarterly snapshot of their business based on a handful of useful metrics (average time to collect payment, etc). For those FreshBooks account holders that share their profession with us, we go further and compare your metrics against those of other businesses in your profession and tell you what percentile of the group you fall into.
There is more about the industry data we’ll be posting quarterly from now on in the new industry benchmarking section of our site. Please note that FreshBooks account holders have access to far richer data than is available in the industry benchmarks because they get it at the profession level – not the industry level – and because we deliver more metrics to them than we offer publicly.
What you do with the insights you get from your report card is up to you. In the video below I tell the story of Terry, an IT professional I met at a customer dinner who used his report to change the way he runs his business based on what he learned about himself when we was compared to his peers.
This Monday October 13th, 2008 the FreshBooks office will be closed for Canadian Thanksgiving. I know it is a little earlier than the same hoilday down south, but hey it’s also usually a little colder here, so we need the turkey sooner to fatten us up!
If you need assistance, visit our forum and you may find the answers you’re looking for. If not, email and phone support will be back up and running on Tuesday morning.
“Well the tens of thousands of Americans who have recently lost their job as a result of this economic downturn may turn to our next guest to get back on their feet”.
These are the words that introduced Mike this morning on the Fox News Business show Money for Breakfast. With all that is going on today, everyone is trying to find better ways to run their businesses, and we were pretty honored to be on Fox New Business to talk about FreshBooks.
FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service that helps professionals in over 100 countries save time, get paid faster, look professional and focus on what they love to do — their work. Read our customer survey results — 99% recommend FreshBooks. FreshBooks users are served by a tight-knit team of 31 dedicated individuals based in Toronto, Canada who've been at this since 2003.
Copyright © 2000-2009