It’s our second annual costume contest today at FreshBooks! Like last year, we’re opening up the voting to the public. So, check out our costumes and post your vote in the comments section below.
If you’ve glanced around the “Reports” tab recently, you might have seen our latest addition: the Profit Loss report. This report determines your gross profit, net profit, total expenses, and finally, your net profit. It also introduces a FreshBooks reporting first: Cost of Goods Sold, or COGS.
Expenses can become a Cost of Goods Sold one of two ways. Firstly, any expenses you rebill to a client (ie put on an invoice) will be included in your Cost of Goods Sold. Second, when you are on your Profit & Loss report, you can “edit” your Cost of Goods Sold (note the blue “edit” link above) and add expense categories you want to be included in your COGS. We’ll remember which categories you consider COGS so this report runs smoothly in the future.
I won’t get too deep into the thick of things, but the Profit Loss report is a powerful new tool in your FreshBooks arsenal. Login to your account, have a look, and tell us what you think.
A short while ago we announced we’d be bringing our How to Build a Web App Business workshop to Boston, Vancouver and Chicago in the coming months. Many of you have been asking about dates, times and places and we’re really excited to let you know our itinerary is in place!
Stay tuned for details on workshops in Vancouver and Chicago, but first stop is Boston on Thursday, November 12 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Virtual Phone System company Grasshopper‘s headquarters. Seating is limited to 40 people and the cost is $100 per person. We’ll even make sure you don’t leave hungry or beer-less. Register now!
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 anyone travelling such great distances to get the goods.
Once again, the details (in short form) are:
What: How to Build a Web App Business workshop lead by FreshBooks’ CEO Mike McDerment Where: Grasshopper HQ (197 1st Ave., Suite 200, Needham, MA) When: Thursday, November 12, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. How much: $100 per person Register here!
Leave a comment or drop me a note at rayanne [at] freshbooks.com if you have any questions you want Mike to address.
And if you want us to take the workshop to your town, vote here! Maybe we’ll be seeing you soon.
This Monday October 12th, 2009 the FreshBooks office will be closed for Canadian Thanksgiving. During the long weekend, many of us will spend time with our family and friends while expanding our bellies with delicious home cooked meals.
If you need assistance during the long weekend, please visit our forums where you might find the answer you are looking for. If not, please email us or leave us a message and we will be happy to assist you on Tuesday morning.
One of the most exciting aspects of launching or growing a great small business is the sheer thrill of all the opportunities in front of you. You’ve got a great business concept, tons of energy and there is nothing but opportunity in front of you. Whoo hoo!
We often refer to those opportunities at FreshBooks as “Green Fields”.
At the same time, as exciting and appealing as all of that opportunity is, it can also pose an equally powerful threat to your growth. On more than one occasion I have referred to this threat as being “paralyzed by choice”.
Are you paralyzed by choice?
The reason you are paralyzed is that you are a small business constrained by your own resources. There is only so much you can actually do. Trying to deal with all the opportunities at once can become overwhelming. You start and stop so many things that suddenly you can’t make any of that great potential happen.
That’s where “choosing” becomes the single most powerful enabler of growth. And its power is not in selecting…it is really in eliminating. By choosing you are both deciding what to do and what not to do. That’s powerful. And once those choices are made, you and the rest of your team can start to really mobilize around those choices. Every day people can move and make decisions using your choices as the guide – and eliminate all the other opportunities from the decision equation.
And that’s when things really start to happen and you begin to advance your efforts. All of a sudden you feel like you are moving forward and growing.
Making choices is more important than making the right choices
I’ve often said that the act of making choices is more important than making the right choices. And I believe that because it drives you into action and results. And, with so much opportunity in front of you nearly all of your choices are going to be good ones. So even if you choose your fifth best idea to go forward with instead of what would have been your first that’s great! At least you move that forward.
And, in the unlucky and unlikely event that you do make a bad decision, at least you will figure out early that it was a bad decision because you moved it forward fast enough.
Finally, the beauty of choosing is that you can keep choosing. Once you’ve moved one agenda or priority forward sufficiently, be sure to look at your choices again and see which might be best next.
So, if you find yourself facing the “Green Fields” of opportunity in front of you and feeling a bit “paralyzed” then choose your way out. Make your choices, get in action behind them and start growing!
FreshBooks is hiring developers and designers. As you can imagine, we get a lot of resumes from folks looking to work here. I spend much of my time every day going through resumes, looking for folks we want to interview. And I’ve been doing this for quite some time, so I’ve built up some learning around what sorts of resumes make me want to interview the resume owner.
I thought folks might be interested — whether you’re looking for a job, or looking to hire a developer, here’s some “resume signals” I’ve learned to recognize that help me decide to interview someone. I call them
The Three Be’s
Be Specific: I mean to yourself — what did YOU do? Don’t say, “Built software in accordance with requirements.” Say, “Created interface so component ABC could securely connect to service GHI. Refactored 37 objects to make them conform to RFC 1800.” If you can’t be specific about what YOU have done, why should I try to imagine it for you? Likewise, if you’re reading lots and lots of resumes, look for folks get specific like this. Chances are, they’re excited about what they do, and believe me, there’s a great deal of correlation between liking what you do and being good at it.
Be Relevant: It’s not too hard to figure out what FreshBooks does (hint: invoices are involved). Take the time to figure it out, and then tweak your resume to show us why YOU are right for US. You’d think this would be obvious — that an applicant would want to show their desire for the job, but start receiving resumes and you’ll pretty soon find an endless parade of resumes sent out with no effort to match skills or experience to the actual opportunity. And again, it turns out that there’s a pretty good correlation between people who take the time to learn about your company, and people who will do well at your company.
Be Discerning: “Discerning” is a high-faluting sort of word, but the idea here is to NOT include absolutely everything. Five-page resumes full of thick paragraphs, endless lists of acronyms and long columns of bullets just make you look like everyone else. What you leave out is as important (if not MORE important) than what you put in. If I have to pick through the unsorted debris of your career, guess what? I’m going to miss that one crucial detail that makes it obvious I should hire you.
So those are the three B’s that I’ve found useful in evaluating resumes. If you’re sending yours out and around, hopefully this gave you some insight into what sorts of things an employer like myself might be looking for. If you’re looking to hire a developer or other technical roles, hopefully you’ve got a new set of criteria you can use to manage the incoming stream.
ClientSpot helps your team track projects and invoice them in FreshBooks.
Do you work in teams? Keeping on top of projects in a team is an art more than a science. Having good tools to help is an essential way to keep costs down and clients happy. That’s where ClientSpot fits in. By focusing on organizing collaboration between your team members and the client, ClientSpot fills a real need in the project management space.
ClientSpot has a robust set of team collaboration features. It does the basic like time tracking, file sharing, and shared calendars, but it goes a step further with Outlook calendar synchronization and even the ability to create customizable databases. ClienSpot also manages retainers with clients. Not only can you keep track of how many hours are left in the retainer, your clients can log in and keep track too.
We’ve noticed some unusual behavior on our Web servers lately: Firefox browsers requesting pages, especially the pop-up timer, over and over, at rates up to 10 requests per second. Even blocking affected users in Apache didn’t work — the requests continued even when we were returning 403 Forbidden errors.
Thanks to the cooperation of a handful of users, we narrowed it down to the Skype extension for Firefox. As it turns out, that extension is what the Mozilla folks politely call problematic, and the behavior we saw is listed there: “web pages may continually refresh or stop loading”.
Therefore, we recommend disabling or uninstalling the Skype Firefox extension. Since Skype automatically installs that extension, many of you may have it without being aware. You can disable or uninstall it via the “Add-ons” item in the “Tools” menu.
It’s not necessary to uninstall Skype. The only problem is the Firefox extension that comes with it. If you do require that extension, upgrading to the latest version of Skype, 4.x, may help; all of the affected users so far have been using Skype 3.x.
With FreshBooks, Javelin CRM gives you control of your sales pipeline from lead to client to money in the bank.
If your company needs to manage a lot of leads in the sales process, you need a good tool to keep you on top of the pipeline, month after month. Javelin CRM makes it easy for your entire team to stay organized and focused on closing more sales.
Javelin will keep track of the people and companies you do business with, communications with them, sales opportunities, and what needs to be done when.
Now that Javelin integrates with FreshBooks, you can track invoices and payments directly in Javelin. You’ll get a complete view of your customers in one place from initial contact right through to final payment.
Additionally, updates to contact details in Javelin are applied automatically to FreshBooks meaning you can get on with better things than updating contact details in two places. If you’ve got a stack of clients in FreshBooks already, then good news – Javelin will automatically import these when you link the two systems.
As a special offer for FreshBooks users, use the code “FRESHBOOKS” during sign up to get 10% off Javelin for the first 12 months. Coupon valid until October 1, 2010.
If you liked this, check out our other add-ons. We’re always looking for better ways to fit into your world.
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.
will send an invoice and a dolphin will swim the length of a 
