Big congratulations to Groovy Squared for having the amazing MiniBooks for FreshBooks featured in the iPhone App Store. As of Wednesday night and ongoing, they are the #4 featured app!
If you have ever used MiniBooks, you would not be surprised. It is a truly stunning application, and we’re honoured that they built it for FreshBooks.
High five!
The FreshBooks office will be closed on Monday, August 3rd, for a civic holiday (Simcoe Day). This civic holiday honours the late John Graves Simcoe for his contributions to Canada including his work to abolish slavery.
For most Ontarians, the Civic holiday will be a nice long weekend to fire up the barbecue grills and enjoy a nice cold drink on the patio.
If you need any assistance, please visit our forum and you may find the answers you are looking for. If not, email and phone support will be back up and running on Tuesday morning.
Tighten the sales cycle with FormSpring‘s lead capture forms and order forms that now integrate with FreshBooks
The last thing you want to give a potential new client is the virtual run around. Now with FormSpring’s new integration with FreshBooks, you can cut out all the manual entry. No more copy and paste. FormSpring helps you capture new leads directly from a Web form and into FreshBooks as your next new client.
It gets better too! You can also set up order forms on the Web with FormSpring which will create new draft estimates and invoices in FreshBooks automatically. Your sales pipeline suddenly got a lot tighter.
You can even use FormSpring’s Smart Routing to notify others in your organization when an estimate or invoice request comes in. For example, route web design leads to Julie and print production leads to Ron.
Get started by checking out the screencast above and then signing up for FormSpring.
If you liked this, check out our other add-ons. We’re always looking for better ways to fit into your world.
Create, edit, and send FreshBooks invoices on your iPhone.
We’re so proud to announce that the development studio Groovy Squared has built a delicious native iPhone app for FreshBooks, MiniBooks for FreshBooks.
Earlier this year, we published one of the first open source iPhone apps, which was an offline time tracker for FreshBooks. We hoped that others would come and better us.
Well, MiniBooks has smashed all expectations. You can create and edit clients from the phone. It integrates with the iPhone address book. You can can create multiple timers. And as you can see from the screenshot, you can credit, edit, and send invoices from your iPhone. It even allows you to enter payments as the client hands you the check!
But don’t take our word for it. Here are some of the rave reviews that keep coming in:
For mobile warriors with spotty connections, MiniBooks will seemlessly manage synchronization with your FreshBooks account regardless of your network connection.
MiniBooks is available for purchase from iTunes App Store. You can also get the free MiniBooks Lite to see if it works for you.
If you liked this, check out our other add-ons. We’re always looking for better ways to fit into your world.
Your FreshBooks account will be unavailable for a brief period (approximately 10 minutes) at 9:00am EDT on Tuesday morning (July 28, 2009) while we update the FreshBooks service.
We will be posting updates to our Twitter account as well as at status.freshbooks.com throughout the maintenance period. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Update: This update has been completed.
Last year FreshBooks was awarded second place in the Backbone Magazine PICK 20 Web 2.0 Awards and we’re pleased to report that this year we won the whole shebang! The PICK 20 is an award given to the top 20 web apps in Canada, and we’re honoured to have earned the designation as the top app north of the 49th parallel.
The contest is run by Backbone Magazine and KPMG, and we’re grateful to them and all the judges who spent their time evaluating all the apps in Canada and who chose to bestow this award upon us. Also, if you look carefully, you’ll see that our own CEO was a judge… but he didn’t vote for FreshBooks — pinky swear!
Big congrats, as well, to all the smart companies who join us as 2009 PICK 20 finalists, including Clarity Accounting, CoveritLive, Radian6 and Well.ca!
The whole team at FreshBooks works really hard to deliver you the goods every day, so it means a lot to us to receive this recognition! Thanks!
RightSignature lets your clients electronically sign FreshBooks invoices and estimates using their familiar handwritten signature.
For an online invoicing company that tries to get you paid faster, nothing is more frustrating than making you wait for a client to physically sign and mail back an invoice for approval. With RightSignature’s integration with FreshBooks, you can now get your clients to sign your invoices and estimates at Internet speed. That is a huge victory.
What’s especially nice about RightSignature is they allow your clients to sign in a human recognizable form: the handwritten signature. By waving their mouse or putting finger to your iPhone, they can sign their name just like with quill and ink.
Check out the screencast on the RightSignature add-ons page to see how you can use RightSignature and FreshBooks to manage your entire deal process, including NDAs, estimates, contracts, change orders, and invoices.
Or, if you’re keen to give it a try, go ahead and sign up for RightSignature!
If you liked this, check out our other add-ons. We’re always looking for better ways to fit into your world.
This add-on has been discontinued in favour of the newer DataSynch for Salesforce and FreshBooks add-on.
Keeping track from lead to deal to dollar has never been easier. Thanks to the new product from FirmCloud, FreshBooks has finally connected to Salesforce, the popular CRM and business platform.
The FreshBooks Connector is designed for Salesforce CRM users who are using FreshBooks for estimating and invoicing. Each system has it merits, but until now working with them has meant frequent acrobatics to make them work effectively together.
With the FreshBooks Connector getting from lead to cash is now a lot easier. The Connector lets you keep track of client activity in FreshBooks directly on your Salesforce Contact, Account and Opportunity pages. Keep on top of your outstanding invoices, payments collected, and ongoing projects all within Salesforce. Create FreshBooks clients from Contacts and Accounts in a single click, making it very easy to send FreshBooks estimates or invoices to clients as your opportunity progresses.
The Connector also allows you to link Opportunities to FreshBooks invoices and estimates. Know immediately if an estimate was accepted or an invoice was paid all without leaving Salesforce.
You can get started with the FreshBooks to Salesforce Connector here.
If you liked this, check out our other add-ons. We’re always looking for better ways to fit into your world.
Due to the success of our How to Build a Web App Business workshops, and overwhelming demand to take the show on the road, we’re doing just that.
And before we ask for your help, we wanted to show you an overview of the workshop and some feedback from some of our workshop participants:
Fresh Mike Workshop Video from FreshBooks on Vimeo.
Here’s where we need your help! We want YOU to tell us where we should bring our workshop. Please cast your vote below and let us know what you think:
Our second How to Build a Web App Business workshop was held June 16 at FreshBooks’ HQ. Mike walked a group of budding entrepreneurs through his journey building FreshBooks – including topics such as Building Your Team, Marketing Your Product and the 5Ws of Fund Raising.
The response we’ve received from announcing and running these workshops has been amazing. Folks travelled to our Toronto head quarters all the way from Nashville, Raleigh, Washington D.C., Winnipeg, Montreal and Ottawa to join some local entrepreneurs – all interested in building their own web app businesses.
And we’ve definitely taken note of how many of you want us to pay your city a visit to run our workshop there.
We think the workshops have been pretty great, but don’t just take our word for it! Check out what some of our attendees have said:
Matt Read from KarmaCake dropped us the following note:
Just wanted to say that I had a blast during the event and I left definitely feeling more confident about my understanding of the different aspects that go into building a web app. Obviously there’s a ton of work that needs to go into a project to make it successful so it was great hearing advice from the CEO of a company that I really respect and whose product is loved by tons of its users.
Martin Traub-Werner of Raybec Communications said:
I’ve gone through my notes repeatedly over the last couple of weeks and continue to find gems. I appreciate that Mike seems genuinely interested in people’s success and so willingly gave of his time and ideas. I would (and have) recommended this session to anyone who wants to spend some time thinking about their business in a framework that’s already proven successful.
See you on the road!
Note: The workshop will not be live streamed or posted as a video online. We really want to see all you beauts in person! : )
In May we announced we are taking a new approach to designing our web application — an approach where we help you manage your invoicing network. We now help you manage not only your clients and staff, but your subcontractors and vendors by giving you a single platform to send and receive invoices. You see, FreshBooks aims to be the way professionals invoice their clients and contractors, and to do that we recognized we needed to serve you as a network. Today, I want to share some results since we launched our network.
First off, the uptake in our network has exceeded our expectations. Presently about one in five active accounts are connected. When you consider that the vast majority of these users are people who signed up before we offered our invoicing network, that really is an amazing statistic.
Since the launch I’ve been on the phone with entrepreneurs who are connected to other FreshBooks accounts and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned that receiving invoices from your contractors is a big deal. It makes sense because collecting 10 invoices in 8 formats (Word, Excel, PDF, hand written on a napkin!) is a huge pain. Receiving all your invoices from external parties on one platform has huge, time-saving advantages — especially for businesses that rely on a large number of contractors to get stuff done. Some of the people I spoke with went so far as to say they now only work with people who will invoice them using FreshBooks – which totally blows me away. Here’s a quote from Matthew Dunn, “Chief Explainer” of video creation company Say It Visually:
[FreshBooks’ invoicing network is] brilliant, freakin’ brilliant! We’re growing and hiring lots of freelancers and we never get push back from someone when we recommend this tool — they all seem to think it’s great. We get one place to actually manage our projects and contractors, and we have a consistent mechanism to go from contractor estimate to invoicing our customers. Thanks [FreshBooks] for making my life easy.
I’ve been really stoked about the responses because we took a huge risk to build the network. Honestly, there were no guarantees anyone would use these network capabilities, but I believed they would for two reasons. First off, at customer dinners over the last 5 years we’ve always heard about the pain of managing contractors. Second, I had these problems myself with the consultancy I used to run and for which we built the original FreshBooks application. So again, it’s great to see that solving our own problems still drives the business, and the good news is we’ve got more problems to solve!
An outline the FreshBooks network’s use cases, including snapshots of network growth over time.
FreshBooks is an online invoicing, time tracking and expense management service that helps people save time, get paid faster, look professional and focus on what they love to do - their work.
sends more invoices than there are ostriches on the planet. 
