Archive for February, 2010
We now have six How to Build a Web App Business workshops under our belt and we’re showing no signs of slowing down! We’re holding this four-hour workshop filled to the brim with the A to Zs of building a web app business as part of the ruckus we’re causing at SXSW this year.
Our Austin workshop will be on Thursday, March 11 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Texas Coworking (200 E. 6th Street, 3rd Floor). Seating is limited to 40 people and the cost is $100 per person. Lunch, coffee and other delicious beverages will be provided. 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: Texas Coworking (200 E. 6th Street, 3rd Floor, Austin, TX)
When: Thursday, March 11, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
How much: $100 per person
Register here!
Big thanks to the folks from Texas Coworking for hosting us!
Leave a comment or drop Grace a note at grace [at] freshbooks.com if you have any questions you want Mike to address.
It’s not too late if you want us to take the workshop to your town. Vote here and tell us where we should go next!
We are pleased to announce that you can now create invoices with headings that show “Hours/Rate” in addition to, or in replacement of, “Unit Cost/Qty”. We know this will come as a welcome addition to those customers who felt that the item-based orientation never quite matched the nature of their business. Let’s look at how you can take advantage of this new functionality:
Adding a Time Entry Group On The Fly
When you go to your invoice, estimate or recurring profile creation page, you will see your typical invoice headings, but you will also see a new “Add Line” button.
Clicking on the “Add Line” button will reveal the ability to add a new item or a new time entry. In this case you want to create a time entry section, so select “Add Time Entry” and, voilà, you now have a time entry section on your invoice, complete with the new and appropriate headings. Input your time entries, and you’re good.
You can now add lines to either section of the invoice in typical fashion by clicking on the ‘+’ icon beside each row, or you can now also use the “Add Line” button.
If you’ve decided that you don’t need one of the sections after all, clicking the ‘X’ next to the column headings will remove the section entirely.
Time Sheets
Adding entries from time sheets? No problem. A new time entry section will be created automatically if one does not already exist.
Default Settings
We’ve also made it easy to always start with your desired headings. In the settings of your account, under the “Misc” tab, you can choose to always start with “Items”, “Time” or Both “Items” and “Time”:
Templates
The clean and classic templates have been revamped to intelligently display these new line groups and headings. It’s also smart enough to know not to show a group if there are no items or entries in that group.
So There You Have It!
We hope you like the new flexibility and intelligence of the new invoice headings. As always, feedback is appreciated and encouraged!
Your FreshBooks account will be unavailable for a brief period (approximately 10 minutes) at 9:00 am Eastern on Tuesday morning (February 23rd, 2010) while we update the FreshBooks service (hey… that’s good news!).
We will be posting updates to our Twitter account as well as at status.freshbooks.com throughout the scheduled period. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, and thank you for your understanding.
One of the coolest things about working here is talking to customers every day who clearly love what they do for a living as much as we love delivering great customer experiences.
Being a successful freelancer or a small business owner takes passion – it takes commitment, energy and heart. We know you wouldn’t work so darn hard at what you do if you didn’t love it so much. It’s inspiring to work with so many FreshBooks customers who are building successful businesses around the things they love to do.
With Valentine’s Day this weekend, now’s the perfect time to share some of this passion and inspiration. Tell us why you love what you do and you might win one of the special Valentine’s gifts we’ll be dishing out every 15 minutes TODAY between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. EST.
To show you what we mean, we’ll start things rolling for you:
Grace: I love my gig because it’s sooOOoOOo fun! I feel like my life is a vacation!
Rayanne: I love my gig because of our really smart, cool and nice customers : )
Ben V: I love my gig because of Corey.
Corey: I love my gig because of Ben V.
Now it’s your turn! Click the link below to tweet why you love your job with the hashtag #fblove to play along and win!
I love my gig because…
This Monday, February 15, the FreshBooks office will be closed for Family Day in Ontario. During this time, most of us will probably spend some time catching up on some extra beauty sleep, cheering our athletes at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, pursue our various hobbies, or simply do what the holiday name suggest and spend time with our family, with or without Full House reruns.
We would also like to wish a Happy Presidents’ Day to our friends south of the border!
Have a fantastic weekend from all of us at FreshBooks!
Our Fearless Leader and CEO Mike McDerment appeared recently on the Business News Network to talk about Cloud Computing and its implications. Click the link to watch it, and be sure to check out the second segment as well (we’ve noticed some loading issues with part II – you may have to wait a little for it to run properly).
At 8:30 AM EST this morning we had an issue in our Dallas Data centre and switched to our secondary Data centre in Virginia. We are now back operating in Dallas, however the activities you performed in your account during the time at Virginia (9:15-9:47 AM EST) currently still reside EXCLUSIVELY in the Virginia data centre/servers.
To get things back to normal we’d suggest that you simply re-perform the FreshBooks activities/tasks that you took between 9:15-9:47 AM – be it sending invoices, logging time, etc.
If you need any assistance all those records and activities are still available on the Virginia server and we can help you replicate those efforts – please contact us.
So you know, we have not isolated the root cause of the outage as of yet. Our development teams are tracking down suspected causes and our operations team is monitoring the server closely. First thing first was to restore service (which we have done) and we will update this post with more details as we have them.
We will be updating this post throughout the day with additional information about this outage. You can also follow our status tweets for immediate notification.
We would like to apologize to anyone that was affected by this outage, and we would like to make it up to you. Please get in touch with us at 1-866-303-6061 or email us at support@freshbooks.com.
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