Just a little reminder that the FreshBooks office will be closed Thursday, December 25th and Friday, December 26th for Christmas and Boxing Day. If you need assistance, visit our forum or check out our guides.
Happy Holidays, Happy Channukah, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!
This past Monday FreshBooks was honoured to be a sponsor of a landmark event here in Toronto:
Starting out as a single Twitter message, this rapidly turned into a discussion that turned into a planning committee that turned into one of the biggest third-party fund-raisers for the Daily Bread food bank of 2008.
I was fortunate enough to be part of the committee that pulled the whole thing together, and I can tell you that watching this event snowball into what it ended up as: the must-attend holiday party for the Toronto tech community that pulled in $25,000 for the Daily Bread when the dust had settled and the donations were counted.
It’s a fantastic story: over a three-week span a group of near-strangers, communicating at first solely by Twitter, used free resources on the web (email, wikis, blogs), as well as their own resources and connections to plan the event, find all the resources (like a space), and rope in dozens of sponsors big and small across the entire Toronto technology community. In the end we sold out all 600 tickets in only 9 days, generated a thousand planning emails (my Inbox is sighing with relief that it’s all over), and acquired over a thousand pounds of food at the party.
And when we needed to ship a thousand pounds of food from the party to the Daily Bread, who stepped up to help us? THE ARMY. Yup, the 48th Highlanders showed up with a truck and some willing folks to load up and deliver food just where it was needed.
When you have the connections to get the Army out to help you, you know you’re doing something right.
Obviously FreshBooks was thrilled to be able to sponsor this event, and a whole pile of FreshBookers were in attendance:
As you can see, a good time was had by all.
Rayanne, Grace and Andrew: FreshBookers on the scene!
As one of the organizers of the event, it means a lot to me to be able to thank FreshBooks, the other sponsors, and everyone who donated time, energy, food and money to make HoHoTO the huge success it was.
And in case you like your stories told with motion pictures, here is an awesome video recap of #hohoto:
Just a heads-up that FreshBooks will be unavailable tonight starting at 10:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. We plan to be back up and running around 10:15. You can follow the developments from the FreshBooks status blog if you’d like more information.
So again, please make sure you’re not in the middle of anything at 10. Sorry for the inconvenience.
On this Sunday, Dec 14 2008 at 10:00 PM EST (Monday Dec 15 3:00 AM UTC), FreshBooks will be unavailable for a short period while we relocate the application onto new servers. We expect the application to be unavailable for only a few minutes. These new servers will enable us to better provide you with a responsive, reliable and secure service.
While things are unavailable, you can see how things are going by reading the updates to our status blog.
What’s New?
Now you can accept invoices from other FreshBooks users inside your account.
We added this capability because we had requests from customers who were receiving invoices from other FreshBooks users and wanted a way to get organized. So we implemented this feature and it’s available from your invoices tab:
How does it work?
When you view an invoice sent to you from another FreshBooks user, you will be asked if you want invoices from this person to appear in your FreshBooks account. Click “Yes”, and your existing and future invoices from this user will appear in your “Received Invoices” sub-tab.
Convert received invoices to expenses
There’s more to received invoices than just staying organized. We’ve also made it quick and simple to convert a received invoice into an expense, perfect for re-billing to a client:
For those of you who receive invoices in currencies other than the currency of your FreshBooks account, you will be prompted to set an appropriate change to the amount of your expense.
Estimates too
Once you choose to receive invoices from another account, estimates sent from that same account will show in your “Received Estimates” sub-tab, and vice versa.
Why receiving invoices (and estimates) matters
I used to do a lot of project work with contractors, and because my contractors and I both brought new business to each other, I used to find it really difficult and time consuming to figure out who owed who what.
For example, I ran a web design shop. We often worked with a local developer named Ben. If I invited Ben onto three projects and he invited me onto four – all of this over a 2 month period – we wound up have no clue what we owed each other, and to figure it out would take a lot of work. We’ve solved this problem with the receiving invoices tab.
Now every time I send Ben work, he replies with an invoice or estimate, and I receive it inside my account. Likewise if he sends me work instead. With FreshBooks as our record keeper it only takes a minute to answer the question, “who owes who what”? That saves a lot of time, and helps me understand your cashflow which is incredibly important.
Psst, pass the word on
For those of you who have a lot of vendors sending you invoices, you might want to consider encouraging these vendors to invoice you using FreshBooks – it’s a really nice way to keep things organized.
A quick note of thanks to the folks at ReadWriteWeb, who have recognized FreshBooks as one of the Top 10 International [Web] Products of 2008:
FreshBooks, the Canadian online invoicing, time and expense tracking service for individuals and small companies, has been showing steady growth over the past year according to Compete, and claims to have over 500K new users since May 2004.
We compared FreshBooks with other online accounting services in August this year, and decided it was easy to use, includes a host of useful features, has an active forum, and offers benchmark data by industry to its users. More recently, we looked at FreshBooks Report Cards which provide an insight into how your business fares in relation to other businesses in your profession. Selected as one of the PICK 20 top Web 2.0 leaders in Canada in September this year, we think FreshBooks deserves a mention here too.
It’s an honor to be mentioned alongside the best applications from other countries around the world. Thanks ReadWriteWeb.
The FreshBoooks Supper Club Newsletter
Did you know that FreshBooks has a monthly newsletter called the FreshBooks Supper Club?
If you read November’s Supper Club and watch the all the videos, you will see that two of the three videos are connected in some not so obvious pop culture way…if you think you think you know how they are connected, just drop your answer in the comment field of this here post (with your correct email address in case you win!) or email me and I will let you know if you won.
I’m not sure what the prize will be yet, but it will be something cool…not as cool as a NEW CAR or a 60 lbs bar of silver…but I have a feeling it will be way cooler than my “Saul’s Birthday Present” present from the newsletter…cause that may be cheese!
Ted Rogers, indisputably one of Canada’s most legendary business figures, died yesterday at home, surrounded by loved ones.
Successful, pioneering and visionary, Ted built a media empire by making big bets. There were times when no one believed Rogers would crawl out from under all the debt he took on, but counting on recurring revenue from Cable TV, and his legal mastery of the government regulation of telecommunications, Ted and his company Rogers survived and prospered.
Our condolences go out to Ted’s family and friends. CBC coverage can be found here.
Photo courtesy of Paul Chiasson/Canadian Press.
If you have never heard of a sparkline, they are what Edward Tufte describes as “word sized graphics.” Said another way, they are little charts that you can use in the middle of a paragraph. Said yet another way, they are really cool.
Colin Ramsay, who runs Plastiscenic, and is a customer of ours, has created a really fun little application on our API. It displays a sparkline of revenue by month.
It’s a pretty compact way of seeing whether you are on track in your business or not. I’ll let Colin explain what it all means:
Ones in which invoice totals exceed the specified upper threshold are marked in green, and ones which are lower than the lower threshold are red. Everything else is black. To the side of the graph, there’s a numerical readout of the invoice totals from this month and the previous month, again coloured accordingly.
If you’re interested in using it for yourself, Colin has provided the source.
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