So, what we may have failed to mention to all our customers and readers is that every year around this time we shut down the office and support for the main statutory holidays (Christmas – December 25th, Boxing Day – December 26th [which resulted in our office closed yesterday the 28th this year] and New Year’s – January 1st).
The rest of the days most of us are taking some time off to relax, but all the newbies are providing the customer support everyone is used to. It is a rite of passage of sorts for everyone who starts here at FreshBooks that they have to come in to the office to answer the phones, respond to emails and questions on the forums. If you want to meet some of our bright eyed newbies, give us a call this week!
For anyone that needed help yesterday, I apologize for the late notice, but we are back now!
Looking back on 2009, it’s been an amazing year for FreshBooks. We moved into a new office, started up a whole new line of business workshops and showed up on the cover of Entrepreneur magazine! As the year winds to a close we wanted to take a moment and share with all of you some of the highlights of the year for us.
Choice New Features
Profit/Loss Report
Just in time for tax season we introduced a new look to our reports, including the all-new Profit/Loss report that lets you compare your revenues with your expenses.
Salesforce Integration
The 800-pound gorilla of sales pipeline management came to FreshBooks with an easy-to-use integration.
Software as a Network
2009 saw amazing growth in the FreshBooks “Network” — customers can receive invoices from other FreshBooks users, convert them into expenses to bill THEIR clients, and collaborate on projects together.
FreshBooks in the News!
Winning the Webware 100
Boy, were we proud to win this award! In heady company like Google and Microsoft, FreshBooks won a Webware 100 award for Productivity.
Globe and Mail, next big thing
When the leading Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail, called us “The Next Big Thing”, we were pretty stoked. When they put up this great video of Mike telling the FreshBooks story, we were flabbergasted.
Cover of Entrepreneur Magazine
Entrepreneur Magazine put Mike on the cover (in all his unshaven glory), and we gave away a few thousand copies to our customers.
Small Business Web
In association with a variety of other online providers, FreshBooks helped launch The Small Business Web to bring together tools and services that anyone starting a small business would find critically useful.
Behind the scenes at FreshBooks
Customer Dinners
We love taking our customers out to dinner whenever we find ourselves in a new town. Our customers are just so friendly and fun to talk to! Thanks to everyone who responded to our invites in 2009.
Team Graduations
As you may know, every new employee at FreshBooks does a couple of months on Support, talking to our customers and learning about the business. It’s always a fun day when someone graduates and becomes an official “FreshBooks Support Rockstar”, so the team always finds crazy ways to celebrate!
Building a Web App Workshops
It’s no secret that Mike is a great speaker who knows more than a thing or two about building successful web app businesses. He’s been on the road delivering the message in cities all across North America — sign up and vote to have him come to your town in 2010!
So that’s a quick selection of things from 2009. Thanks to all of you for giving us the opportunity to serve you and some very happy holidays!
Today around 4:45pm EST our hosting provider Rackspace experienced an outage at one of our data centres and as a result FreshBooks was unavailable for 28 minutes (until about 5:15pm EST). We have been in touch with Rackspace to determine the cause of the outage. However, at this time, we don’t have any further details.
Since the downtime was short, we opted not to switch to our backup data centre. If we are in this situation again and an outage was prolonged, we do have an alternate data centre we can use to restore service to the FreshBooks application.
We put a high value on always being there for you. We are truly sorry for the inconvenience. If this outage affected you, please contact us and we will try to make it up to you. Please note (and we recognize this isn’t the best message to send!) it is presently Friday afternoon at 5:30 PM, and the weekend starts in about half an hour. So if we don’t get back to your today, we will first thing Monday. As it stands now though, we were able to answer a slew of phone calls and we seem to be on top of email, but again, feel free to drop us a note if you were impacted and thanks again for your understanding.
Finally, for future reference, we have a Status Blog which gives real-time updates of the FreshBooks service in the event of an outage like this afternoon’s.
37signals made a number of application changes over the weekend, which has led to an API incompatibility with our Basecamp Project Collaboration to FreshBooks integration. Specifically, Basecamp is no longer returning e-mail address fields for contacts, which makes them difficult to import into FreshBooks since you can’t create a user in FreshBooks without an e-mail address. On the plus side, project imports should continue to work for clients that have already been imported.
We’ve sent a note to the team at 37signals and are scouring their forums and developer newsgroup for an update; we will update this post with more information as we get it and deploy a fix as soon as it is available (assuming that’s what’s called for). FWIW, from the looks of their status page and this thread, it’s likely just a temporary issue as 37signals migrates accounts to their new system. Anyways, please stay tuned and thanks for your understanding.
Update 11:45 PM: The Basecamp API is functioning as normal, and so is our contact importer. Sorry about the inconvenience.
It can seem at times like being part of a small company is just day after day of trying to keep total chaos from overwhelming everything. Things are happening so fast, there’s so much to do and so few hands to do it, that just getting through the day without collapsing seems like an achievement.
And it’s natural to think that anything you can do to suppress that chaos is a Good Thing To Do. So we come up with checklists and plans and processes, all designed to stamp out chaos wherever we find it. It’s certainly been my instinct all through my career — find chaos, and CRUSH IT.
Sometimes meetings at FreshBooks can resemble a bit of a free-for-all, with everyone chipping in ideas and taking the conversation in all sorts of unexpected directions. Sometimes we lose track of what the meeting’s “supposed” to be about and end up exploring totally different ideas. Iteration planning sessions turn into feature brainstorms, and brainstorms turn into analysis discussions. Sometimes people have to duck out early, and sometimes they come in late (or without having been invited).
Now, I’m someone who takes a VERY organized approach to running meetings. I try to have an agenda, I try to stick to a timetable — running meetings is something of a specialty of mine, and in general I tend to run smooth, productive meetings.
So sometimes it’s especially hard for me when a FreshBooks meeting goes off into uncharted territory. My instinct is to stomp down on the burgeoning chaos and bring it all under immediate control. But I have to admit, my efforts to do so are not always full of success.
One thing I’ve learned is that in fact a certain amount of chaos (of the RIGHT kind of chaos) is useful — maybe even vital — to a company’s health. It’s out of that chaos that true creativity can emerge. One of the things that often happens as a company grows is that well-meaning people like myself work so hard to stamp out the chaos that they kill off everything that made the company successful in the first place. Small companies have access to creativity because their employees are always living in a chaotic environment, so innovation is always required.
Now that said, innovation also needs some sort of predictability in its environment in order to survive and flourish. And at FreshBooks we work really hard to be VERY disciplined about things like how we test and deploy software, and how we handle customer information and so on. Some parts of our business cannot have the slightest chaos in them. But meetings? Not so much.
And so part of my journey at FreshBooks has been about learning to maintain chaos where appropriate. To not shut down conversation just because it’s veering from my carefully-worked out agenda. Because in that chaos is where much of what makes FreshBooks such a great place to work lives.
Have you ever found your business stifled by an excess of rules and process?
Magento offers a comprehensive set of tools for all of your e-commerce needs!
Just in time for the holiday shopping season comes yet another shopping cart integration from Carry The One. Magento is a full e-commerce solution for businesses both big and small.
The Magento to FreshBooks integration helps you consolidate your online orders with FreshBooks. Every time a customer purchases a product from your online shop, an invoice is created in your FreshBooks account. If you have revenue coming from several different sources, this is a great way to keep track of all of your orders within your FreshBooks account.
While Magento may seem to be a solution for larger businesses, they do offer a free version in Magento Community. So if you’re in the market for an e-commerce solution, take a look at Magento.
If you’re interested in this integration, don’t forget to check out the rest of them in our add-ons section.
TimeDroid lets you track your time on the go using your Android Smartphone.
With more and more Android phones out there, the call for FreshBooks on Android has been loud and clear. FreshBooks customers and Android development shop, Appoxy, has heard you and created TimeDroid, the first Android app for FreshBooks.
TimeDroid will turn your Android phone into a mobile time tracking device for your FreshBooks account. It’s an easy to use application that lets you track time to your projects and then submit them on the fly.
For those of you that have been waiting for an Android application, give TimeDroid a try. You can download it in the Android Market by searching for ‘TimeDroid’.
If you like this integration, be sure to check out the rest of them in our add-ons section.
Back at FreshBooks headquarters, we’ve been making plans for 2010. We’re excited about the year ahead, and we’ve come to realize we have an enormous amount of work to do. Much of the work is design work, so we’ve decided to build an internal design team to help us achieve our goals.
We believe in design. Design helps us Execute on Extraordinary Experiences Everyday and we want every touch point people have with FreshBooks to leave them inspired by what we do, and certain to refer us to their friends. Just last year we won awards alongside small companies, massive companies (like Google, Microsoft and Intuit), as well as companies the world over, and we believe design is a big part of the reason why.
We need our design team to further the FreshBooks application, evolve our brand and lead us through the creation of new products and properties. Some people might see invoicing as boring – but not us! We’re on a mission – a mission to help businesses get paid, and if you or someone you know can help us, please pass this link along. Here are the roles we’re hiring, and the bounty that we’ll award anyone who refers the successful candidate our way:
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 
