The Fastest Way to Invoice Your Clients

FreshBooks iPhone application is finally here!

by Sunir Shah - October 22/2008

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.

The fastest way to track your time and invoice your clients is with FreshBooks, the leader in online invoicing. Sign up for your free account!

60 Comments (add comment)

Oct 22/08
3:48 pm

Looks cool!

Any plans to integrate other functions of FB into the app? I’d just love to have a list of clients with overdue invoices…complete with phone number, of course.

Oct 22/08
5:42 pm
Scott says:

Excellent!

Thank you.

Where do I submit feature requests. I like the ability to change the date. I also would like the ability to put it in landscape mode. especially for typing notes for the task. I was wondering if I was going to have to do this myself.

Oct 22/08
5:56 pm

App looks great. You should consider adding in even more features of FreshBooks to the iPhone.

Oct 22/08
5:59 pm
Jason Siffring says:

Nice job! I use your OSX widget a lot and his will be very handy, too.

You’ve got to come up with a better way to authenticate though. Typing in your 32 random letter and number API key is slightly ridiculous.

How about making your cell phone number a setting online and then send me a text message with a five digit confirmation code like most other apps work?

Oct 22/08
7:12 pm
Russ Wittmann says:

Great Job! I Ditto what @Joe Cooter says!

I would love to be able to send an invoice from my iPhone right then and there so my client can cut me a check that day.

Oct 22/08
7:14 pm

Downloaded the app today. We are using it already! Thanks Freshbooks, you just made us even more efficient. It also convinced my business partner to buy an iPhone! He bought one a few hours ago.

Oct 23/08
2:16 am
Weston Triemstra says:

Cool beans. Thanks!

Oct 23/08
4:30 am
Benjy says:

Good work. This is just what I need when I’m off having ‘lunch meetings’ :)

Oct 23/08
8:35 am

[...] while being offline. All the data is fed to the FreshBook web server once you get online again.[via FreshBooks Blog] Related Posts Random Posts CO-OP is a Twitter for Project ManagementOctober 21, [...]

Oct 23/08
9:33 am

If , over lunch, the average man consumes a beer, in 10 mins and I get through 2 beers and a glass of water and an appetizer…carry the 1….how many hours was that “lunch meeting”???

No more back tracking when I’m not at my computer!!!

Thanks guys!

Oct 23/08
12:58 pm
Baback says:

It looks great. BUT I create projects by the month for each client. The program is limited to 100 projects so it does not list all of my projects.

Because of that I cannot use the app for projects past 100 and for me thats cut off mid point of the letter “P”

PLEASE expand the limit to much higher #’s PLEASE!!!!

Oct 23/08
1:46 pm

awesome! thanks for a great app, and service.

Oct 23/08
7:24 pm

You guys rock!

Any plans to integrate other features of FreshBooks into the app? I’d love to have my Client list available in such a beautiful and quick format.

Oct 23/08
9:58 pm
Jason O'Brien says:

Wow. I’m on the verge of buying an iPhone (and paying $125 to break from Verizon) and you just pushed me over the edge.

I look forward to loading this up tomorrow on my new iPhone! Thanks!

Oct 23/08
10:12 pm
Nigel says:

Darn, I was in the process of developing this same application. I guess I’ll just use this one for my iPhone.

Oct 24/08
3:16 am
Dominic Gray says:

Interested in a Microsoft Smartphone version that is just not limited to time tracking, but invoicing and payment collection as well.

Oct 24/08
6:54 am
Stuart says:

This is great! Thanks a lot.

Oct 24/08
10:16 am

I love all the positive feedback here! Baback, I have alerted the designers to your predicament, hopefully a fix will be found soon. As for the invoicing and payment collection: it is possible right now to do it through the browser (I know it is a pain) and it would be more complicated than the time tracking ap, but we are discussing this option. Happy Friday everyone! :)

Oct 24/08
10:46 am

I’ve been waiting for this since I started using FreshBooks, but the app seems to be buggy. It frequently crashes on me when I try to change the project. Only a full restart of the iPhone clears this up (temporarily).

Oct 24/08
12:22 pm
Brian says:

Nice!! I was hoping you guys were working on this — and, yes, in fact you are. Love it. Thanks so much — I’ve been recommending you all left & right, great stuff!

Oct 24/08
1:51 pm
emarketed says:

Nice work freshbooks!!

Oct 24/08
2:35 pm
Roland says:

Any chance we’ll be able to view timsheet info any time soon? I know I can login through the browser, but it would be nice to see it from within the app. Great work guys!

Oct 24/08
4:01 pm
Milo says:

HUGE WOOOOT WOOOOOT! Great job again Freshbook guys.

Oct 25/08
10:58 am
Dirk Kelly says:

Great works, thanks guys :-)

Oct 25/08
2:16 pm

Any chance you guys will port this to Blackberry? *crossing fingers*

Oct 26/08
6:02 am

When I saw the new iphone app I was so happy.

I’m totally in love with Fresh books, so having the ability to track my time straight to it was a goddsend.

one problem I have found is that wen you send in the tracked time, the online tracker goes a little weird with the times.
one job I did took 2hrs 20 min’s and it came up on fresh books as 1hr 80 min’s – so that’s something that might need to be bug fixed for the next update.

other then that It’s brilliant!!

Oct 26/08
9:10 pm

I love you guys. :D

Oct 28/08
8:43 pm
Chris Haskins says:

Don’t leave us N95 guys out cold! Great job getting this out, looks great!

Oct 28/08
11:14 pm
John Stringer says:

I am so happy to see a Freshbooks app for the iPhone – especially since I begged for one a few months ago.
The feature I would really like to see is the ability to make and send a new invoice from the iphone. That would be a huge benefit. I would pay $10 for the app for that ability.

Oct 29/08
9:27 am
Zack says:

Now that’s outstandingly outstanding!

I can use this immediately, in fact I’m d-loading now and headed out the door to a client’s.
Perfect!

I will definitely blog about this :)

thanks!

Oct 29/08
1:47 pm
virtualnerd says:

You guys are just amazing. Very cool.

I too would love to see this ported to the BlackBerry so we wonks can track our time without the ‘puter too.

Oct 30/08
3:23 pm

Thanks everyone for the great feedback!

Nov 10/08
7:45 pm
sam says:

iPhone app crashes 3 seconds after launch. Surprised Freshbooks didn’t test it before they release. Would be nice it it worked

Nov 11/08
1:31 pm

Great! How about creating a fully mobile, iPhone, formatted site of Freshbooks? I would find that very useful in my business.

Keep up the great work!

Cheers, Bradley

Nov 11/08
2:17 pm

@sam, there is one known crash when the number of projects and number of tasks is very large. The phone runs out of memory. We’re trying to figure out a solution to that problem for the next update. Send us an email to support@freshbooks.com with your login URL and we can see what’s going on.

Nov 13/08
2:33 pm
Nicole says:

Please, please make this app for Blackberry along with the ability to invoice!!

Nov 19/08
7:40 pm

Looks great. How about porting it to the Android OS? I would love to use this on my T-Mobile G1.

Nov 19/08
7:56 pm
Jessica says:

the app crashes upon scrolling thru projects, unusable at this point.

Nov 23/08
7:04 am

Excellent App. Have just submitted positive review on the UK Itunes store. Hope it shows up and you get the credit for this.
Unlike Jessical I’ve had no crashes whatsoever and found it to be very stable.

Nov 26/08
11:03 am
JTE says:

Great! Now give us one for Google’s Android OS! :-)

Nov 26/08
3:17 pm

Hey folks, we acknowledge the app crashes when the iPhone runs out of memory. That’s a hard nut to crack, but we’re trying to figure it out. If you could send an email to support@freshbooks.com, we can better track what’s going on.

@JTE, what phone do you have?

Dec 1/08
12:27 pm
Dallas says:

Can’t authenticate. I’ve tried typing in the API token like 50 times. Everything is correct. Been using the widget on the mac for quite a while no issues there. But the phone app won’t login. Bummer.

Dec 1/08
7:49 pm
Dallas says:

Disregard that last post. Got it to work. Not sure how. But something to do with the cursor being left in the token field after I fixed a typo. Once I moved it to the sub-domain field after I fixed the typo it took. I dunno.

Looking forward to using it. Freshbooks!!!

Dec 2/08
4:56 pm
Matthias says:

Great application.
Some things I would like to see though:
1. Feedback of what I have entered. Maybe some kind of overview per client/project/day like the website has? Or a calendar?
2. A report feature to easily give a client an account of hours spent. That is very important.
3. The ability to change the date when entering times.
Mobile invoicing is less of a concern. I would do that at the office/home.
Thanks!

Dec 10/08
2:41 pm
Simon says:

Awesome guys. Just expand it, include more obvious features that the majority of posts speak of above.

Keep up the great work.

Dec 11/08
7:34 am
Chameleon says:

Can’t wait to see this on Android. I <3 my G1!

Jan 3/09
1:18 pm

[...] been using them for a almost a year and will definitely keep using them for a long time! Also, the iPhone/iPod touch app [...]

Jan 4/09
5:04 am

thanks for the head sup. It is very interesting.

Jan 27/09
8:27 pm
Ben says:

I would also like to request this app for the BlackBerry.

Feb 10/09
8:56 am
mic says:

Another request for a Blackberry app please!

Mar 15/09
4:39 pm
sivas says:

very good, thanks

Mar 16/09
8:05 pm
Mike Ham says:

Great work. Thank you.

Mar 24/09
8:45 am
Nat says:

BlackBerry Storm and WindowsXP widget please!

Mar 29/09
6:19 pm
Lucian says:

Any idea whether Matthias (Dec 2)’s comments will make it into a future version? They are very sensible (especially the date one!), without that the app isn’t really usable..

Apr 1/09
5:15 pm

Hey Lucian,

We’ve been working on a new version for a while, but it’s an uphill battle working with the iPhone. I’m not sure I understand the use case to change the date exactly. Are you entering time on the road for things that happened a week ago? Or is it related to the issue where if you entered time on your iPhone or iPod a week ago, it gets entered into FreshBooks for today’s date?

– Sunir, FreshBooks

May 6/09
6:17 pm
AdrianL says:

Android Android please please please!

Jun 2/09
3:54 am
Steve Mathieson says:

Excellent, No more racking my brains on dates and times spent working for clients. Be great if you could log expenses as well!

Jun 2/09
2:03 pm
luckymud says:

Nice simple interface. But I believe Harvest has you beat with their iPhone Apps. First, their time keeper app allows you to create multiple clocks for a given day and freely switch between them as the interruptions come, and it allows you to manually update time and notes if you so desire. Second, they also have a stripped down web interface for the iPhone, which allows you to enter both time and expenses. What’s more, the expenses can be parametric, so when I enter miles the app calculates dollars based on my Harvest settings. In fact, if Harvest didn’t have such great apps for time and expense capture, I’d switch to Freshbooks, because your estimating and invoicing systems are superior to Harvest. But if I can’t get it in the system, there’s no need to worry about invoicing.

Sep 21/09
4:31 pm
Andrew says:

the freshbooks app isn’t on the iTunes store anymore!

Nov 4/09
10:01 am

[...] looking for easy invoicing, Freshbooks is a great solution (see our coverage of the app here). The iPhone app lets you track your time and add it to client bills that you issue. Or you can use the MiniBooks [...]


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