Since the release I’ve been on the phone with a number of business owners who are using FreshBooks to manage their invoicing network and we learned they wanted more – they want to invite their vendors and contractors to invoice them, not just invite their contractors to track time on their projects. “Why?” is this a big deal you ask? I had the same question and I put it to every entrepreneur I spoke with.
What they told me was the benefit of receiving all their invoices in one format on one platform is enormous. Before they used to get 10 invoices a month from 4 contractors in many different formats (Word, Excel, PDF, hand written…). All these formats created frustrating inconsistencies, but all their invoices in FreshBooks takes the pain away, and it helps them clearly understand their cash flow. Most mind blowing of all to me is the contractors were grateful for the recommendation.
Another thing the entrepreneurs explained was that the ability to quickly receive estimates inside their FreshBooks accounts was a big deal. Thanks to FreshBooks they they can now quickly request, organize and evaluate multiple project proposals/bids/estimates/quotes from multiple vendors. FreshBooks takes the hassle out of collecting bids, and it makes it dead simple to accept the winning proposal and get on with the work.
After learning these things we hopped to it and made it easy to request other professionals to send you invoices and estimates. We’re pleased to announce that you can now invite people to invoice you or send you estimates. Here are some screen shots that show you where you can start the invitation process from within your FreshBooks account:
FreshBooks was unavailable for approximately 40 minutes earlier today due to an outage in our Dallas Fort Worth data center. You can read more about the outage here as it impacted many popular websites.
Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We were able to offer updates on our progress via http://status.freshbooks.com, and should you ever encounter downtime you think might be associated with FreshBooks, we encourage you to check our status.
We’re pleased to report all systems have returned to normal. But if you are continuing to experience troubles with your FreshBooks account, please call us at 1.866.303.6061 or email us at support@freshbooks.com and let us know.
Thank you for you patience and understanding and have a great day.
With this mornings release, a few design tweaks were added to the FreshBooks popup timer — in fact, the popup timer has a totally new look. We felt the old popup timer design was very outdated and we wanted a fresher look — more like our iPhone Time Tracker app. Take a look at some before and after shots below:
As you can see, several key components of the timer have been enlarged. First, the font of the running timer has been increased making it easier to read (now you can keep an eye on your timer while you’re standing over by the water cooler ). Second, the Start/Stop button was made bigger and is now front and center making it more obvious and easier to click. The Reset button is now on its own and we hope this will prevent people from accidentally clearing out their hours (I know I’ve done this before).
Thanks to popular demand, you’ll also notice a new button was added allowing you to switch the time format from hours (e.g. 1.5 hrs) to hours:minutes:seconds (e.g. 01:30:00). Both formats increment at the same time, but keep in mind that when you log your hours the timesheet only displays in the hours format (e.g. 1.5 hrs).
I thought I’d wrap up with a little known fact: did you know you can enter time into the Hours field in the format of hours:minutes, and FreshBooks will automatically convert that into hours in decimal format? It’s a useful feature that not many people know about so I thought I’d share. This can be done on the timer and on the FreshBooks timesheets.
We hope you enjoy the shiny new timer, as always please send us your feedback by commenting below.
Last Thursday I gave a talk about Twitter to the Toronto chapter of the American Marketing Association (AMA). I told them the FreshBooks story and how we like to Execute on Extraordinary Experiences Everyday, then I gave them 5 things a marketing department can do with Twitter and I thought I’d share those things here and give some examples of how we do each one at FreshBooks.
Disclaimer for non-Twitter freaks: read the conversations/photos from the bottom up, that’s the way conversations work on Twitter!
Serve customers
We use our @FreshBooks account to answer questions – doing support for our customers is what initially led us to use Twitter.
Establish brand voice
As you can see, we like to be playful, silly and inane here at FreshBooks.
Deepen relationships
Here’s an example of a customer who was having a rough day and we wanted here to know she’s not alone, we also sent her flowers.
Engage brand fans
We like games, and this is us playing “Eye Spy” on Twitter with some friends.
Break news
This one went out about 15 minutes we before our last release…
Parting thought
As you can see there is lots you can do with twitter – we think you’re only limited by your imagination!
Slife Web makes sure you bill for every minute with their FreshBooks integration.
If you’re one of those people who at the end of a 10 hour day has only managed to log 4 hours of work, Slife Web may just be the thing for you. Slife automatically sits there on your computer watching what you do all day long. At the end of the day, it reports exactly how many hours you were processing email, heads down coding, or researching on the web. All without you having to start and stop a watch.
I’m happy to hear that Slife plans on open sourcing the clients. I hope a plethora of extensions will be built to track all sorts of work flows.
But most of all, I’m super excited that Slife recently integrated with FreshBooks. You can now export time logged in Slife into FreshBooks. If you try it out, I’d love to hear below if you found that you were underbilling your time.
If you liked this, check out our other add-ons. We’re always looking for better ways to fit into your world.
We’ve trickled out a number of improvements to FreshBooks since our last release. Most address the feedback we received regarding our new invoicing pages, but we’ve also tweaked a couple other things, particularly:
New preview pages and client views
After you’ve created an invoice or estimate, you’re invited to preview your invoice from your client’s perspective. This is a pretty important view of your invoice, so we’ve classed it up. Now you’ll find a bright clean status ribbon on the top-left, which makes the current state of the invoice abundantly clear (i.e. paid). The invoice itself now sports a nice bordered shadow, and the action links above have been replaced with multi-action buttons.
But there’s more – you can now send invoices and estimates from the preview page as an administrator or staff user. This means you can review your document one final time before hitting the “Send” button.
Faster edit pages
Our new invoice and estimate pages, which we released mid-May, came at a cost. All those dynamic goodies – like the ability to re-order lines, and auto-expanding description boxes – required more processing power. Users with unusually large invoices were encountering slow-loading edit pages, sometimes having to wait 30+ seconds before they could make a single edit. Ouch. Well, we’ve been steadily releasing performance fixes since then (the first one came the very next day), and we’re proud to say that our invoice and estimate pages are now smoking fast.
To give you an idea, the graph above shows the approximate loading time of an abnormally-sized invoice (100+ lines) since we first released our re-designed edit pages. These benchmarks are from Firefox 3; Safari and Chrome load this example invoice in just one second.
Insert lines anywhere
Due to popular demand, you can now insert lines after any line on an invoice or estimate (again). Just hover over an invoice line, and a “plus” icon will appear on the left. Click the icon, and voila – a brand new line. Combined with line re-ordering, it doesn’t get much easier to draft up invoices/estimates.
Re-usable item creation makeover
Last, but not least, we’ve totally redesigned our inline item creation. Without leaving your current workflow, you can create a re-usable item directly on the invoice, complete with auto-expanding description box, configurable taxes, and so on. Plus it doesn’t look half bad either.
That’s it – short and sweet. Please take a look, and as always, your feedback is appreciated.
Taking care of customers is Job Number 1. For many clients, the most important point of contact is your customer support desk. One of the best support ticketing tools available is ZenDesk, and now they have built a time tracking integration with FreshBooks using our API.
While working on a ticket, you can now track your billable hours simply and easily with their FreshBooks widget. Set it up for all your employees at once. No muss, no fuss. You can then log into FreshBooks and generate invoices for all your hours or service.
The FreshBooks widget hovers eagerly on the right, waiting to track your time!
I meet lots of web entrepreneurs who tell me they want to raise venture capital. Most of these people are first time entrepreneurs and they just assume that once they’ve got an idea, the next thing to do is raise venture capital. That’s naive. I always ask myself is, “is this person/company ready to raise money?” and 99 times out of 100 the answer is “no”. I’m writing this post in an effort to explain what goes through my head at those times and when it is right to raise institutional capital.
So, when is the time to raise Venture capital?
When: you don’t need the money
This may seem counter-intuitive on a whole bunch of levels, but the time to raise money is when you don’t need it. What I mean by “don’t need it” is you can carry on without it, or you have alternatives (like other people who want to invest, or a house you will mortgage). Many entrepreneurs don’t understand the value of finding their way without VC money, or they think they need the money more than they actually do, or they think they need it sooner than they do, or all of the above! (READ: the 7 ways I’ve almost killed FreshBooks) The result is they spend a lot of time too early in their businesses lifecycle focused on serving VCs instead of serving their customers. Raising money is a negotiation. You need options when you are sitting at the bargaining table – you need a path without capital, a legitimate path.
When: you have a product
Don’t talk to a VC until you have a product. There are exceptions to every rule, but unless you have built a successful business before, or your business requires millions and millions of dollars to build V1 of your product (think microchips), don’t talk to VCs before you have a working product or prototype.
I’ve met entrepreneurs who tell me, “I’ve got this great idea, I’m going to start shopping it around to VCs.” Thanks to the web, it’s incredibly cheap to build a business. VCs know this too and their role in building businesses have changed since the first internet bubble. Back then entrepreneurs with ideas needed VCs to pay for infrastructure and servers and bandwidth – these things used to be expensive –today they are not. The consequence, VCs have no incentive to fund ideas…they can wait till later in the process of building a business. And it’s important that they do because they want to be sure…
When: You know your customer better than anyone
I personally believe this is the most misunderstood milestone on the path to raising Venture Capital for both VCs and entrepreneurs – the “I know my customers better than anyone” stage. If you know your customers, or perhaps you’ve scratched your own itch and you ARE your customer, you are now enormously valuable to yourself and anyone who is going to invest in you. The difference between VCs and entrepreneurs is customers: entrepreneurs have them, VCs don’t (though I’d argue their LPs are their customers, and the best of the VCs know that entrepreneurs are their customers and they serve them accordingly…but I digress). Knowledge of your customer is what is going to make you a better strategic decision maker and product designer than your VCs could ever hope to be. Remember Facebook Beacon? From what I gather Zuckerberg was against it because he knew his customer, the VCs…well, let’s just say Beacon looked great on paper.
Knowing your customer better than anyone is valuable. You should use it as a bargaining chip when it does come time to negotiate, but you have to invest in it. You need to phone your users, take them out to lunch and surveys are not enough. It doesn’t come fast or easy. So build your product and get to know your customers – I’d suggest 100 conversations (not emails!) is a good start. And don’t try to tell me they won’t talk to you on the phone. Have you asked? Email them an invite to speak with the founder of the service they are using about their experience. Your early adopters will be all over that. And if you have enough early adopters…
When: You have traction
If you have a product and you know your customers better than anyone, you are on your path to traction. But if people don’t become repeat users of your site or service, then you need to make sure they do. Do your customers refer you? Do you have early adopters who champion you? Do people write you up in blogs or on twitter of their own free will? Repeatedly? Do people actually pay for your service?!! Those are signs of traction. VCs have enough good opportunities in front of them that they can choose from companies that have traction – you better make sure you do, and your friends using the service does not count.
Finally, when: you know what you’re getting yourself into
Don’t raise money if you think it means you’re going to stay in control. Raising money is the first step on the path to loss of control – know that. It starts with equity and a board seat. It’s my belief that if you raise money once you’ll raise money three times. If that’s the case…you might like the terms at round one, but have you thought about the terms at rounds two and three? If you have and you like your place at that stage of the race, proceed. If not, don’t. Really…you should be asking yourself, do I want to build something big or do I want control. IF you want control, you’re going to be very unhappy with the VC path, so do the gut check before you proceed.
Disclaimer: I have never raised Venture Capital and FreshBooks has no institutional backing. That said, I have raised money and I do spend a lot of time thinking about capital, and I handle a lot of calls from VCs who would like to invest in FreshBooks. Bottom line: take my advice as you will.
Just a heads up that we will be closing our offices today at 4:30pm EST due to our annual (well technically this is the first) FreshBooks PaintBall Madness.
If you have any questions regarding FreshBooks, you can still send leave us a voice mail (1-866-303-6061) or an email at support @ freshbooks.com. We’ll make sure to contact you back as soon as possible on Monday morning
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.
). Second, the Start/Stop button was made bigger and is now front and center making it more obvious and easier to click. The Reset button is now on its own and we hope this will prevent people from accidentally clearing out their hours (I know I’ve done this before).
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