The FreshBooks crew will be moving into their bigger, better and shinier new office starting Monday, March 2nd. This will be FreshBooks’ third office move.
Our office will be closing earlier today while we pack our things and customer support will be offered up until 4:00pm (ET) today. Our phone lines might be in flux during our move, so if you need assistance after 4:00pm, please visit our forum and you may find the answers you are looking for. Customer support will resume at our regular office hours at 9:00am (ET) in our new office on Monday March 2nd.
Our new office is located at:
2770 Dufferin St.
Suite 201
Toronto ON
M6B 3R7
Canada
The workshop sold out weeks in advance and we heard from some folks who wanted to be there, but couldn’t make it or didn’t get a ticket in time. We feel bad for those guys, so we decided to bring the fun home!
On Tuesday, April 14, 2009, Mike will host an intimate How to Build a Web App Business workshop at FreshBooks HQ in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Seating is limited to 50 people and the cost is $50. Refreshments will be provided.
Mike will address many of the questions you have as entrepreneurs through topics such as:
Building – your web app, your company, your team Marketing – with and without dollars Product management – so you know what’s right to build Metrics – to track your progress Financing – the who, what, when, where, why and how 5Ws of fund raising
There’s a guaranteed a spot for any out of towners (well, outside Ontario-ers) who want to attend.
Once again, the details (in short form) are:
What: How to Build a Web App Business workshop lead by FreshBooks’ CEO Mike McDerment Where: FreshBooks HQ (2770 Dufferin St., Suite 201, Toronto, Canada) When: Tuesday, April 14, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. How much: $50 per person Register here: http://buildingawebapp.eventbrite.com
Leave a comment or drop me a note at rayanne [at] freshbooks.com if you have any questions you want Mike to address.
We’ve recently added a couple new features that will make managing your billed and unbilled hours easier.
See which entries are billed/unbilled
Up until last week’s release, it wasn’t possible to see which individual hours were invoiced – only per-project sums. This data is now visible on your timesheet, where a time entry is either ‘billed’ or ‘unbilled’, according to the final column in the time entry table. If it still has the blue ‘edit’ link, it’s unbilled and free to be edited. If it says ‘billed’, it’s exactly that – and no longer editable, which means …
Billed hours become locked
No more mistakenly editing hours that have already appeared on an invoice – or worse, already paid by your client. From now on, the ‘edit’ link disappears for billed hours. You can still change the data, if you really must, but you’ll need to mark it as ‘unbilled’ first – or delete the invoice on which it appears and start over. Did you know that time entries on deleted invoices become unbilled again?
Mark your time as billed/unbilled
We’re also giving users more control over their hours. Before, the only way to mark hours as billed was to generate an invoice for them. Now project managers can do it manually via the timesheet.
This is helpful if you’re heavily modifying your timesheet-generated invoices – like collapsing two time entry lines into one. Or, say, if you’re inputting time entry data from another billing system, which has already been billed.
That’s a wrap
That sums up changes to billed and unbilled hours from our latest release. Hope you find them helpful.
TechCrunch reports today that Intuit’s Quicken Online sent a letter to Mint requesting proof of their phenomenal recent growth from 600,000 to 800,000 users in a couple of months. I know that’s incredible growth, but Intuit shouldn’t be surprised.
Mint has not only done amazing things for personal finance software, but they are hanging ten on a huge wave lifting everyone in the small business software-as-a-service (SaaS) market. FreshBooks just crossed over 700,000 users, and January was far and away our biggest month ever. New Zealand-based online accounting service, Xero, also boasted adding 1000 new paying customers in 50 days for a total of 4000. And Kashflowcelebrated crossing 2,500 paying customers in the UK.
The Internet economy seems to be growing faster than the wider economy is shrinking. Facebook and MySpace and Google Apps are teaching millions of people about SaaS every month. Moreover, people are surprisingly increasingly willing to spend money online, even as spending trends are down in the wider economy. ComScore reported online commerce grew 2% year-over-year in January, rebounding very quickly from a 3% drop in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Of course, this positive trend will most help those who have already achieved market traction at the start of 2009. Just like surfing, only those who have already swam out from the beach will catch that market wave. And it should be a big one. So, if you’re surprised by the numbers today, just wait to see the killer numbers by the end of 2009.
You may not have noticed, but in last week’s release, we added a few changes to our trusty web-based timer popup. In the past year we’ve released a snazzy iPhone app and desktop widget, but hopefully these changes will put our old school timer on the same playing field.
Now with memory
Now if you accidentally close your timer, or your browser crashes while it’s running, the next time you open the timer it will begin where you left off. ‘Bout time!
Convert from HH:MM
Yes, FreshBooks uses decimal time almost exclusively. It makes billing easy, and it’s simple enough for 15 minute intervals, but what about tough amounts like, say, 49 minutes? Now you can enter HH:MM values into the timer, and it will automatically convert to decimal time.
As an added bonus, if you hover over the timer at the top, it will break down the time into hours, minutes and seconds for you.
Resume from a given time
Ever forget to start your timer, 20 minutes into a billable task you’ve been working on? Well, now you can enter 20 minutes into the input box, hit ‘Resume’, and the timer will begin from that point and count forwards.
That about sums up what we’ve done with the timer. Enjoy.
When you are building a web app you need to collect feedback. As someone who’s conducted both telephone and email surveys over a large user base for years, it’s my opinion that telephone interviews are vastly more valuable than email surveys.
From the earliest days we did telephone interviews with our customers. We prepared surveys and then we reached out to customers by email and by calling direct and scheduling times to talk about our web app. Making a call like that is scary, but time and time again our early adopters did nothing but give us encouragement and show us the way.
So what do you need to be successful with user interviews? You need to prepare a survey – or rather a call script – before you pick up the phone. You need it so you can make the best use of your precious time. You also need it for consistency so you can start to see trends in the questions you are most interested in.
For example, we always ask questions like:
- what were you using to invoice before?
- how long did you spend invoicing before?
- how long after?
Now those look like questions you could put in an email survey right? Well, let me tell you what I learned from the calls that I’ve never seen on an email survey.
On many calls people would tell me, “your software changed my behaviour”. At that point in time my heart would stop…but inevitably, after what felt like an eternity, they would tell me, “now I invoice as I do my work instead of putting it off until the end of the month!” and man, were they excited! I always thought it was bad if software changed your behaviour – turns out I was wrong, and I maintain that I would never have learned this from an email survey.
Other reasons the telephone is so much better? Intangibles – the important bits come out in the slight inflection of the voice, a quick gasp at a question or a thoughtful reply. When you hear a cue like this and you are on the phone, you can ask people what they are thinking and explore things. When you do that, you’ll start a conversation that will take you places you never imagined. I’d take a sample of 10 telephone interviews over 1000 email replies. Also, you’ll be amazed how energizing it is to talk with people who use your product. When you are sitting in your basement putting your life and soul into building your business, energy is priceless. In person interviews would be even better I’m sure, but it’s hard to make those happen when you are just getting started.
There are downsides to telephone interviews: they take longer to prepare, and they are more time consuming to carry out and you have to talk with people – which developers often don’t like to do. But I think those obstacles are well worth overcoming.
Last week we added the ability to manage temporal date variables on recurring profiles. What are temporal variables you ask? Great question.
Let’s say you invoice a customer every month for “one month of web hosting”. If you sign a customer up for 12 months and charge them monthly, the line item on your invoice will read “one month of web hosting”. The trouble with that is, there is not much context. For example, a customer might wonder, “is this bill for this month’s hosting or next month’s, or was it last month’s?” Using temporal variables, you can answer this question.
As you can see, your invoice line items will now dynamically generate the month name (for example “February” for this month) when you insert the ::month::.
If people prepay for your services and the invoices are for next month, simply add a +1 (like this ::month+1::) and March will display instead of February when the recurring profile creates the invoice. You can add -1 if the invoice is for last month’s services.
This feature is really useful for companies like web hosts and ISPs who charge monthly, quarterly or annual recurring fees.
To access a legend of the variables you can click on the “Learn more about dynamic invoice variables” link in the blue help section we’ve added to the “New recurring” page. When you do you’ll get this pop-up legend:
As the most loving of festivities approached, we thought it was a perfect opportunity to remind you all how much we care about you. On behalf of the entire team at FreshBooks HQ, thanks so much for choosing FreshBooks. We really do love you ‘round these parts!
Check out our Valentine’s Day video dedicated to all of you, shot and produced by our very own, talented Randy.
We’re pleased to report that this morning’s release was successful. Access to accounts was unavailable for 6 minutes and we want to thank everyone who thanks to everyone who encountered a “maintenance” message for their patience and understanding.
Here are some tidbits from the release:
Recurring profiles have been improved. You can now create date-specific notes and descriptions using dynamic variables that will automatically update key information (date, etc) each time the profile sends out an invoice. This is a much-requested feature that folks with large numbers of recurring bills will find useful. In addition, you can now easily see which hours are billed or unbilled and mark hours as billed or unbilled quickly using FreshBooks’s time tracking service.
There have been a number of other enhancements released and you can learn more about this release from inside you account by clicking the “last updated” link in the footer of you account. We hope you enjoy the recent improvements.
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