The FreshBooks network is 20% connected
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.
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4:31 pm
All of my subcontractors are required to sign up for Freshbooks and invoice me using this system. It works amazingly well – not to mention the ease it provides for when I need to do my accounting! I can just run a report to see what payments I have outstanding, and what i’ve paid thus far!
The only complaint I have is that I need a ‘Request that this invoice be marked as PAID’ option, or the choice to mark it as PAID on my end. Sometimes contractors don’t do this, and then the reports I run are off.
Either way, I love Freshbooks and recommend it to everyone!
10:35 pm
We had a freelance sign up and provide us an estimate. We received an email we use for our freshbooks account, but NO estimate in or received tab.
I logged out of freshbooks and left a message for support and was NEVER contacted. Not sure I would recommend it right now
Sheldon
6:50 am
Sheldon – we will look into this immediately – especially the email no reply as that does not sound like us at all, but also the technical piece. I’m very sorry to learn of this experience you’ve had. More info to follow shortly (our office opens in 1.5 hours).
9:02 am
Sheldon – I now have some follow up info.
We found support 5 tickets that contain your website domain. All of them were from at least 9 months ago and had a reply (except for one, rejected as it was an email recommending us to try FreshBooks). As far as we can tell you only have one account with us. One thing we are wondering is if maybe the submit process did not happen on the logout web form.
So you know we also tried searching for various name (Sheldon, your forum name) in our email support system with no results returned. I have a feeling there are other pieces of the puzzle missing (request sent in using personal email, etc). Please let us know if you have another email address that you may be mailing us with.
Regarding your estimates not showing up on your account, our QA team investigated this and re-tested this on Production here is what Momchil who did the test had to say:
“From an existing Production system, I create a new Team Member – Contractor. The contractor receives the invitation and signs up for a new FreshBooks account. The two systems are now connected, contractor gets the client and the project added into their system. After that the contractor creates an estimate for the client who sent them the invitation and the estimate is properly received and visible in the original system’s Received tab.
Now, the person commenting on the blog was not clear if this is what they did. All he/she said was “We had a freelance sign up and provide us an estimate. We received an email we use for our freshbooks account, but NO estimate in or received tab.” It is highly possible that they contacted their freelancer and said hey, go to that website, sign up for an account and send me an estimate. So the freelancer created a FB account, created a client and sent that client an estimate. This is why the email for the estimate was received. However, at this point the two accounts are not linked, so if the original person goes into their FB account, they would not see the estimate. They need to click on the link in the email, then accept the connection with the freelancer’s system and only after would he/she be able to see the estimate in the received tab.
Alternatively, they can add the freelancer as a contractor and link the accounts this way. It is likely that such an invite was never sent.
I think we need more information here. Specific systems would help as well, both theirs and the system of their freelancer. I believe it’s a case of misunderstanding, instead of anything actually broken with our process.”
So – that is what Momchil is saying. Please let us know if there are any pieces of the puzzle you can fill or, and I invite you to phone us should you ever encounter something like this ever again. Thank you and again I am sorry for the experience you had and hope this helps clarify things to some extent.
- mike
2:13 pm
Hello,
Thanks for the follow up Mike, Tim contacted me from support and we worked through the issue.
Thank you again for your quick responce and having a chance to talk with TIM about this issue!
I still love FRESHBOOKS! (would be better with a “latepayment” feature)
Sheldon
9:09 pm
Freshbooks is fantastic…. Well done. Your ideas are wonderful and implementation is flawless. The freshbooks network is a powerful feature, and I too recommend it too everyone I work with.
Keep up the great work!
9:14 pm
A latepayment feature would be outstanding!!
12:44 pm
I have built a late payment feature that charges interest and penalties. If you’re interested in using it, please call me, Richard, at:
1-888-309-3289 x5
I’d love to talk to people about the feature to see what they think, and set you up with a trial!
11:40 pm
When someone is paying via 2CO, its not reflecting in FB showing that its PAID.
8:09 am
@Annada – may I recommend you send an email to support@FreshBooks.com so we can have a look at your account? Thanks.
8:58 am
Hi Annada, I just tried paying for an invoice using 2Checkout and everything worked out fine. The transaction was processed successfully and the invoice was correctly marked as “paid” in my FreshBooks system. Please do contact us at support@FreshBooks.com and we’ll figure things out.