Staff using MiniBooks for time tracking will from now on be able to create and send invoices and estimates, enter payments, and manage client contact information automatically. This will be amazing for companies with staff in the field.
Don’t worry. FreshBooks will only allow MiniBooks users to do what they are normally allowed to do in FreshBooks. For instance, if you don’t allow your staff to send invoices by themselves in FreshBooks, FreshBooks won’t let them do so in MiniBooks either.
How to get started
You don’t need to update MiniBooks for this to work. As of this morning, it already Just Works ™.
If you’re new to MiniBooks, go get it. When you first run it, MiniBooks will ask you for your subdomain and token. Your subdomain would be joesgarage if your account is joesgarage.freshbooks.com. Here’s how you find your token.
As an adminstrator, you can enable the API and find your Authentication Token under Settings in the top righthand menu, under “FreshBooks API” in the ribbon.
Once you have enabled the FreshBooks API, your staff can find their Authentication Token at the bottom of their Profile, available from the top righthand menu.
But wait, there’s more
The changes we rolled out this morning affect all FreshBooks Add-Ons. Now your staff have full access to the Add-Ons just like you do. For instance, the Salesforce connector will now work smoothly for multi-user organizations.
We’ve said it before: you spend so much time and money driving people to your website only to lose them because they can’t figure out how to buy your services.
If you’re in the business of selling your time, Setster is a phenomenal new tool. Put a button on any website that allows your customers to book an appointment with you there and then.
Every once and a while a big idea comes along – a landmark victory, a four-bagger, a game changer. One that propels your business to a new level.
Those sure are fun!
And while many businesses that have seen strong, ongoing growth often have a few of these big ideas along the way, it’s hard to build a long-term business model on just big ideas.
So, while you’re working on the big win, one of the most practical, efficient and successful ways to keep growing fast is to play small ball.
Small Ball – shoot for consecutive and cumulative wins
When it comes to delivering sustained growth, month after month, year after year I have to tell you I am addicted to small ball. Small ball for me is the ability to deliver small but meaningful enhancements to your business in succession and continually.
A 2% improvement here, a 1% improvement there and a 4% pick up in efficiency here – those small bits can really add up. If you stopped to think about how you can deliver a 10% or a 20% improvement in your business it could be a struggle. Or you might have a few good ideas, but the resources to get there may be out of reach.
Instead, if you thought about how you could improve your business by 1% or 2% you’d likely come up with a bunch of practical, implementable ideas. And the good news is if you string those wins together you get your 10-20%! Even better, if you keep doing it you’ll go way beyond.
So I say shoot for consecutive wins. One after another after another. If you are measuring and learning then it’s easy to continue to find new executions to build off of the next. It’s a code I live by and makes me feel like I can impact the business every day. And that’s a good feeling.
FreshBooks is great for services, but people often ask us if we know a good service to sell products online. For years I have strongly recommended people use Shopify, for one good reason: your products deserve a beautiful online store. Shopify truly delivers a great customer experience, and that will mean more sales for you.
Tracking orders separately in Shopify and FreshBooks has been a huge burden for managing inventory and fulfilment. Those days are over thanks to Carry the One who has built an integration that keeps Shopify and FreshBooks synchronized together.
Now you can seamlessly sell merchandise on the Web with Shopify and track orders in FreshBooks. This powerful combination makes it easy to unify both your e-commerce and wholesale operations in one system.
If you haven’t been thinking about e-commerce yet, this may be a good time to consider it as an inexpensive way to grow your business.
For more advanced customers looking to host shopping carts on their own websites, Carry the One has also built an integration with Zen Cart. If you’re looking for OS Commerce and CRE Loaded keep your eyes peeled on the FreshBooks Add-ons directory as they will appear shortly.
If you liked this, check out our other add-ons. We’re always looking for better ways to fit into your world.
One of the very first integrations we did at FreshBooks was with 37Signals’ web based project collaboration tool Basecamp – it’s an amazing service for anyone who wants to do project management with your clients and team. Today we are pleased to announce that we have made a series of improvements to the integration, and courtesy of our friends at 37Signals, we have a discount to offer you if you want to purchase a Basecamp account.
What’s changed?
Mostly we’ve tightened the integration. Previously, if you were tracking time on a project in Basecamp, and invoiced that project multiple times in FreshBooks, you had to remember which hours you had already billed (filtering by date, or memory skills). Now we remember which hours you’ve invoiced and offer links to the past invoices when you re-import the project. So if you add hours after the fact, they won’t get lost in the shuffle. This is a series of little things, that when you put them together, is a big deal.
We’ve also made other improvements that make configuring your integration with Basecamp smoother. To learn more about Basecamp and our integration, check out our adds on page or visit the Basecamp website.
Basecamp Coupon Code
The good folks at 37Signals have provided us with a Basecamp coupon that will give you a 25% discount on of your first month’s fee . The coupon code is FRESHBC. It expires Sept 30th, so hop to it!
As a historical side note, FreshBooks first integrated with Basecamp back in March 2007. That’s like 1000 years ago in Internet time. If you don’t believe me, just watch the screen cast we made way back then and look at how much our interface has change.
As many of you know, a blog is an affordable and effective way for a small business to expand their online presence. And many of you spend a lot of time and money getting prospects to visit your blog, only to lose them before they’ve asked to do business with you. Today we’ve got a solution that can help. Now visitors to your blog can generate a-la-carte invoices, request estimates and submit their contact information using your TypePad blog with the help of FormSpring.
As any good salesperson will tell you, you have to ask for the sale. You have to make it clear that you want to do business and make it easy for prospects to contact you. The FormSpring integration with FreshBooks has already closed the gap by making it easy to collect customer contact information and take orders from the Web directly into FreshBooks. Today, FormSpring has expanded their integration with FreshBooks by building the FreshBooks Order Form widget for TypePad.
As you can see from the video above, you can use this integration to get important information from your visitors into your FreshBooks account – and more importantly, make the lives of your prospects easier (which is pretty much money in the bank).
TypePad from Six Apart is the premier hosted blogging service for small businesses, and it’s backed up by a dedicated customer service team. For customers looking to jump into blogging but need a helping hand, TypePad is definitely the blogging solution for you. Not only do they have an extensive widget gallery, but their TypePad One team will help you launch your blog on the right foot.
Typepad’s not only a partner, they are customers too
We’ve also been proud to count TypePad as FreshBooks customer for a while now:
I’m Laura Poyneer and I head up the TypePad One Services team at Six Apart. TypePad is the premier hosted blogging service for small business, well known for its customer support. The TypePad One Services team helps our customers take their blogs to the next level of design and optimization.
When looking for an invoicing solution for our team, several TypePad bloggers recommended FreshBooks. We prefer to work with partners who share our belief in excellent customer service and it was clear that FreshBooks would be a good fit. True enough, we signed up for a FreshBooks account and were able to start invoicing customers and accepting payment with PayPal right away.
Lately we have been using the new FreshBooks for TypePad widget to collect contact details from interested customers automatically in FreshBooks. The widget has really saved a lot of time managing our billing, which we’d rather spend doing what we love best – helping our customers make their blogs better!
So without further adieu, we are pleased to announce that you too can use the widget generate leads on your blog, and help quantity the value of the time and energy you put into blogged. Check out the details and get started.
If you liked this, check out our other add-ons. We’re always looking for better ways to fit into your world.
Have you ever wanted to customize the default email message that is sent to your client right when you send an invoice out? Well, as of this morning’s update to FreshBooks, you can.
Now, when you send an invoice, you get a popup that displays your default “New Invoice Notification” and allows you to edit it and enter your own personalized message for your client like “Have a great weekend” or “Say hi to Carol for me”.
Aside from being able to change the body of the email, you can also make changes to your default subject line, say for specialized collections. For example, adding “URGENT” to the subject line or “Invoice 1 of 2″. Pretty useful huh? And not only can you do this for invoices but you can also do this when you send out your estimates.
Enjoy! If you have any comments or feedback, we’d love to hear it.
We’ve done this before with success, so we’re going to try it again. FreshBooks is offering $1500 to anyone who refers successful candidates to FreshBooks, even if you didn’t know we were offering it.
FreshBooks is hiring a number of roles right now, but in particular we are on the lookout for software developers who can build production grade applications using mixed technologies (increasingly Python, also PHP and JavaScript) and seasoned interface designers who solve tough problems and craft inspiring user experiences.
Here is a link to the postings that will earn you a bounty:
We appreciate all the help we can get finding great talent that shares our values of trust, honesty, intelligence, passion and fun. For more information about working at FreshBooks read other posts on this blog or check out http://freshbooks.com/careers, and a please forward this on to your network – thanks!
Footnote/definition: for the record, “successful candidates” is defined as: we hire them, and they are still with us after three months. That is also when we will pay out the bounty. Happy heralding and thanks again for your help!
Today, we’re proud to announce that we now support OAuth, an increasingly popular open protocol for secure API authorization. OAuth is used by many cool services such as Google Docs, Netflix, and Twitter, and we’re glad to join the club!
Over the past year, FreshBooks has grown a large collection of third-party add-ons. Supporting OAuth will make it easier for customers to manage third party add-ons’ access to their FreshBooks data. Add-ons that support OAuth will no longer require customers to search for and then copy and paste their FreshBooks authentication token, which will be a huge relief to customers and third party integrations alike.
More importantly, instead of sharing one authentication token with all third-party add-ons, OAuth creates a separate relationship for each add-on uniquely, all behind the scenes. That means customers will be able to turn on and off access to each separate add-on without affecting any others. This gives customers important control over who has access to their data, and when.
We strongly recommend all third-party add-ons use OAuth for secure authorization since we may eventually require it for all future add-ons.
Just a quick note to let everyone know that FreshBooks HQ will be closed for the Labour Day long weekend on Monday September 7th, 2009. We’ll be back in the office first thing Tuesday morning, and at that time full support (telephone, email, forums, twitter, telepathy…) will be back running full bore.
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 
