Archive:
March, 2010
FreshBooks once again made it down to SXSW Interactive, the Web industry’s biggest party. This year we were told to expect 12,000 attendees, which is a huge number of people to add to our dance card. We were faced with two choices: 24 hour dance marathon or think of creative ways to bring the FreshBooks fun to Austin.
Here’s a run down of 10 ways we rocked SXSW this year. If you liked this, you can also see what FreshBooks did at SXSW Interactive 2008.
1. FreshBooks Supper Club
A lot of people just go to SXSW and never go out to meet the good people of Austin, which is a shame, since Austin is awesome. We flew down early this year to party with the local crowd.
We kicked things off with a good ol’ Texan FreshBooks Supper Club. We took 75 FreshBooks local customers and their friends out to Stubb’s BBQ for a delicious meaty meal. It’s always a good thing to meet your customers, but it’s a great thing when there’s BBQ involved!
2. How to build a web app workshop
Our intrepid CEO, Mike McDerment, also presented his famous How to Build a Web App Workshop hosted at the ever gracious Texas Coworking Space.
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!
3. Bringing home the bacon
If you were wandering outside at lunch, you probably walked past the delicious smell of the FreshBooks bacon stand. We were cooking and handing out FREE bacon.
As Shawn Morton said, “Swag of the year goes to FreshBooks for handing out hot bacon outside the ACC.”
Photo credit: John Biehler
Some of your tweets!
Some of your pics!
Photo credits: Eric Marden, A.J. Lawrence, Melinda Green, Debbie Weil, Daryl Ohrt of Brand Flakes for Breakfast
4. Speaking at SXSW
We were honoured to be chosen to speak at SXSW this year. Thanks to everyone who voted for us! Our CEO, Mike McDerment, joined Kevin Hale of Wufoo, Victoria Ransom of Wildfire, and Ben Tilly now of Google to talk to us about Experimental Design: Your User Interface Is Your Laboratory; and our Support Rockstar, Grace Antonio, led a core conversation on How to Be a Customer Support Rock Star.
5. Loot bags!
We wanted to thank people for attending our talks at SXSW, so we gave out hundreds of loot bags!
There was sugar, a balloon, more sugar, a toy, and more sugar! Who could ask for anything more?
6. Small business, big party
Along with 13 of our partners in the The Small Business Web, we threw a rockin’ good party on Saturday. We counted nearly a thousand people there interested in how to better use Software as a Service to run their small businesses.
At the party we presented an award to Brandon Dunlap, managing director of BrightFly, for being the Small Business Web’s most integrated customer. He uses several of our applications to run his small business and is a shining example of where the future lies for small business software. Plus, he looks hot in a kilt! (photo credit: BatchBlue)
7. FreshBooks Paparazzi
If you were out at night during SXSW looking for a good party, chances are you met our FreshBooks Paparazzi who were on the lookout for celebrities. We captured nearly 1500 SXSW attendees whoopin’ it up with Fabio, Marilyn Monroe, the Jonas Brothers, and Miley Cyrus. Well, at least cardboard cutouts of them.
If you want to see what the otherwise staid and serious crowd at SXSW Interactive looked like as the night and the bar bill wears on, check out our FreshBooks SXSW2010 Flickr pool.
8. Shaking hands
When you meet thousands of people at SXSW, it’s important to have a memorable business card. That’s why we totally channel our inner real estate agents and put our pictures on our business cards. I even have a picture of me giving you my business card so you can cherish the moment forever!
9. Looking professional!
We’re very professional at FreshBooks, which is why we take our appearance very seriously. We insist everyone at FreshBooks wears a necktie. You might have seen one of us wearing one around the conference.
Photo credit: Urlesque
10. One good deed deserves a payment!
We weren’t doing all these crazy things just for fun. We did it for money! Since FreshBooks is the leader in online invoicing, we invoiced everyone we did a good deed for.
(We didn’t really charge people a dollar!)
And that’s how we had a good time at SXSW. What was your best memory of SXSW Interactive?
Good news for our clients that require a specialized tax field (for instance, VAT in the European Union, or ABN in Australia), we now offer two new fields in your ‘Client’ and ‘Company Information’ settings: ‘Tax Name’ and ‘Tax Number’.
These fields will show up under your address and your client’s address information on an invoice.
When you create or edit a client you’ll now see a fields for tax name and number on their profiles. Please note this will only appear for the invoices you create going forward – it does not change historical documents (old invoices).
If you are an existing customer wondering how to enable your VAT number for your company:
* Go to “Settings”, Company profile.
* On your Company profile, you can fill in your Tax Name and Tax Number, e.g. ‘VAT Number’ and your number.
* Click “Save” at the bottom of the form.
To take advantage of this functionality, please ensure that you or your client’s country is set to Australia, New Zealand or any EU27 country. For other countries, please let us know and we will expand support as needed.
Thanks to all our international users for their patience and understanding as we pulled this together. With multi-currency invoicing, multi-language support and now VAT/Tax numbers, we’re working hard to ensure FreshBooks is a great choice for your billing and bookkeeping wherever you are.
Bonjour bons amis! Earlier in the year, we introduced multi-currency invoicing into FreshBooks. With this release we’ve cooked up a new dish for our customers with an appetite for international billing – multi-language invoices and estimates.
You can now choose to have your invoices and estimates appear in Spanish and French. Pretty sweet! More languages will follow of course, and check out the Wufoo form we’ve created so you can tell us the languages you’d like supported.
Language and Currency Tags
When incorporating the new multi-lingual capability we also took the opportunity to both clean up and enhance the usability around multi-currency. Now, when you select a client from the pull down menu two tags will be displayed which indicate the language and the currency of that invoice for that client.
Need to change the language or currency? No worries, click on either tag and witness the new advanced settings widget. Select the language and/or currency, click done, and ba-da-bing it’s now saved for that client.
When you select a different language all of the headings on the invoice itself are translated.
Help us introduce more languages
As mentioned, we’ve launched with Spanish and French invoices, and we’ll add more languages based on demand. Want to help us choose the next language? Translate the FreshBooks invoice template into your language and your translation (or something close to it) may make it into a future release. Thanks in advance!
Another update: The upgrade is complete!
Update: We’ve got a bit more to do than we expected – we now expect tomorrow’s upgrade to take about 15 minutes instead of 10.
If you’ve been using FreshBooks for any time, one of the things you may have noticed is that we try to roll out product updates fairly regularly. That’s one of the big advantages of being Web-based – we make rolling upgrades to the FreshBooks system and every customer is always using the most up-to-date version of the app.
The only slight inconvenience that comes with this is that we sometimes need to take the system offline for very brief periods when we’re rolling out a new release. This happens to be one of those times, so your FreshBooks account will be unavailable for about 15 minutes tomorrow morning (Tuesday, March 23rd at around 9:00 am Eastern time) while we push out the next updates to the system.
We will be posting updates to our Twitter account as well as at status.freshbooks.com while we complete the upgrade. Our apologies for any inconvenience, but we hope you’ll agree that the advantage of regular system updates for all FreshBooks customers makes these brief interruptions worthwhile.
While walking to the office Wednesday, I couldn’t help but notice an odd sight on the side of the road: a broken down, original 1983 Star Wars arcade cabinet, preparing for a journey to the dump. Absent a steering wheel (joystick?), it wasn’t “working condition”, but it looked to be in decent shape.
Needless to say, we couldn’t let a piece of arcade history go without a fight. With the power of no less than 7 FreshBookers, we hoisted the cabinet onto a dolly and rolled it the remaining 3 blocks and into our offices. Uphill. On hot coals. Bonus points: we beat some nearby construction workers to the punch, who were eye-ing the cabinet mightily.
Now that it’s sitting snugly beside our foosball table, but what to do with it? The cabinet itself is in good shape, but most of the electronics are completely absent; we’ve got a “could be working” monitor and some speakers to work with, at best. Some folks are thinking complete restoration, while others have more grandiose plans.
What do you guys think? Oh, and does anyone have some spare Star Wars Arcade parts lying around?
The fine folks who host our main FreshBooks servers need to make some upgrades to the power systems in behind the scenes this weekend. This will help ensure maximum uptime across all our servers. Our hosts have scheduled this maintenance to occur early this Sunday morning, March 21, 2010, between approximately 1:00am and 3:00am Eastern Time (06:00-08:00 GMT)
We’re afraid you won’t be able to access your FreshBooks account for several minutes at a time while this essential hardware upgrade takes place. Our apologies for the inconvenience, but we hope you’ll understand these kinds of improvements are all designed to ensure things run as smoothly as possible for all customers.
If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Now, create and log into FreshBooks accounts from within Google Apps.
We’re pretty excited to be one of the first applications to be listed in the new Google Apps Marketplace, which Google announced last night. The new marketplace will give the 2 million small business customers using Google Apps today an easy way to access some very high quality third party applications.
FreshBooks is honoured to be one of the initial applications Google selected to launch with. And we’re also quite pleased that we’re joined by several of our great integrations partners and fellow members of The Small Business Web, namely
It’s great that Google has taken this next step forward in our market. Google Apps has certainly done a lot of heavy lifting to build the market by providing usable, accessible, and affordable online business tools in the Cloud that are used by millions. Moreover, they have been a leading supporter of the Open Web, helping such protocols as OpenID and OAuth come to fruition. These protocols are building the foundation of a richer, more deeply connected market of web applications.
As small businesses need to expand their business by moving online, they are looking for online tools to help them. And because businesses relying on these tools to manage their work flows, they want their tools to work smoothly together. The Google Apps Marketplace is a great step forward in not only helping millions of businesses find new online tools, but also in connecting these tools together. FreshBooks is happy to have been part of the Google Apps Marketplace from the beginning and to be supporting it strongly into the future.
Update: I should have been clearer that, right now, the marketplace only works when creating new FreshBooks accounts.
Changing existing accounts to use Google Apps for logging in is a more involved problem. As it’s early days for the Google Apps Marketplace right now, we are waiting to see how the marketplace operates to see if there are any glitches before exposing our existing customers to any risks. We wouldn’t want to inadvertently lock our own customers out of their own accounts – as we are dealing with the cashflow of businesses we are naturally inclined to be conservative. We’ll keep you updated on this integration as it evolves.
Update on April 12, 2010: We now support accessing existing FreshBooks accounts from Google Apps.
A big thanks to everyone for all the great feedback from our last release where we introduced the concept of invoice headings that showed hours/rate vs item/unit cost. We’ve taken it all in and are now ready to deliver “round 2” of the release and we think you’ll be pleased. Here’s the run down:
Drop-Down “Task” Column
You’ll be happy to see that we have added a “Task” column to the time-based invoice heading template. The “Task” column works just like the “Item” column, allowing you to pull-in tasks, and to create and save new tasks on the fly. This should save you a lot of time.
Also, when generating an invoice from a project, the Task column will now auto-populate with the appropriate tasks.
Finally, if you had been associating time-based activities, like “consulting”, with Items, you’ll probably want to create those activities now as Tasks.
“Tasks Invoiced” Report
To accompany the new “Task” column we’ve introduced a new “Tasks Invoiced” report. It is identical to your “Item Sales” report and helps you break down your revenues by Task – pretty handy!
Item/Expenses on Bottom of Invoice
If you are showing time entries and Item entries we have now defaulted the Item entries to the bottom of the invoice. This way, if you are showing time entries and expenses the expenses will appear at the bottom of your invoice, not the top.
P&L Report – Select your Start Date
This is unrelated to the invoice headings but a neat little addition to the P&L report. You can now specify a specific ending date for your P&L – ideal if your fiscal year is not Jan-Dec.
So that about sums it up. We’re pretty happy with the updates; hope you are too! Always keep the suggestions coming.
Your FreshBooks account will be unavailable for approximately 10 minutes at 9:00 am Eastern (2:00pm UTC) on Tuesday, March 9, 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.
If you’ve ever talked to the team here at FreshBooks, you know we’re a happy and energetic bunch. A lot of this comes from the simple fact that we really enjoy what we do for a living. What’s great about working with freelancers, small business owners and entrepreneurs every day is that they share the same love for their work that we do. Running a business takes a ton of work, so you probably wouldn’t be doing it if you didn’t love it!
Back in February, we whipped up a little contest for Valentine’s to share some of this inspiring passion, passing the love around using Twitter. After all, Valentine’s day is about sharing the love, and in this case, the love for our work. We asked people to use Twitter to tell us why they love what they do for a chance to win some nice little Valentine’s Day prizes, given out randomly over the course of the day. Some of the responses were just so awesome, we wanted to share a few of them with all of you.
Our favorites included:
- I love being a freelance designer because I can pick up and move to Hawaii
- I love my gig because I get to do what I love to do every day
- I love my gig because I get to work at home doing what I love, designing websites and writing, while watching my son grow
- I love my gig because my morning “commute” takes 15 seconds… except when there’s traffic (kids’ toys in the way)
- I love my gig today because I could win a prize because I love my gig
It was a fun contest for all of us, and we hope that our winners are enjoying their prizes. If you missed out, stay tuned as we’re always looking for an excuse to celebrate and give away more cool stuff!
We wanted to thank people for attending our talks at SXSW, so we gave out hundreds of loot bags!
When you meet thousands of people at SXSW, it’s important to have a memorable business card. That’s why we totally channel our inner real estate agents and put our pictures on our business cards. I even have a picture of me giving you my business card so you can cherish the moment forever!
users collect enough money to buy all 
