Thought I’d share a little moment of simple delight that gave me a very “FreshBooks feeling”.
Last week, I got an email from an old friend who’s a great freelancer, writer and thinker. I’ve known Peter Wolchak for about 10 years, chiefly through my role as a communications bloke and his as a reporter and editor in the Canadian tech/biz community.
To cut a potentially long story short, I’d introduced Peter to another friend, referring a freelance writing opportunity his way. In thanking me for the intro, Peter said: “I hope karma sends you a pony,” which I thought was brilliant. Unable to resist the cheeky response, I fired back: “Forget the pony, where’s my lottery win?”
Well in yesterday’s snail mail, I got a surprise package from Peter. I know it’s bad for the trees, but I still love the (rare) moment of getting a hand-addressed letter in the mail – even better, one that contains something like this:
…not a karmic pony, but it might be the means to buy one.
In case you can’t make it out or you’re reading this through RSS without the images, inside the envelope was a “Cash For Life” lottery scratch card with four chances to win $1,000 a week for life. Just that – no note required; the perfect, funny, surprising gift.
Genius.
As I said, this felt like a very FreshBooks moment, to me. I think what Peter did is exactly the kind of thing embodied in our “4E” approach (“Execute on Extraordinary Experiences Every Day”).
We work hard to exceed expectations, to do things our customers aren’t expecting in everything we do. From the way our killer-hot Support Rockstars go out of their way to over-deliver for customers, even through to the way we keep our roadmap plans close to our chests – always much better to surprise and delight a customer or a friend.
So: thanks Peter. You made my day and gave me a great reminder of the way I hope to make our customers feel every day.
Take five minutes to do something completely surprising for one of your customers, partners or friends. Right now. Karma will shower you with ponies.
*Full disclosure: Peter edits Backbone Magazine, co-creators of the PICK 20 awards. I was a judge for the awards program two years running and voted for FreshBooks as a top Canadian innovator in both judging rounds. FreshBooks won a PICK20 two years running, coming first in 2009. That was, of course, long before I ever dreamed of actually working here one day.
Everyone knows FreshBooks means “Rockstar customer support”. You call our toll-free number and a human being answers the phone. A nice human being, maybe somebody named Grace or Mark or Kasey. You email us and likewise: a human being replies, helps you out, whatever your problem may be.
It’s what we do. And we like to think we’re pretty kickass freakin’ amazing at it.
But there’s always room for improvement…
Giant Stickies plot the future of FreshBooks support
So we’ve decided to declare May 25 – 28 “Support Support Week“.
For one week, we’ve turned the whole company loose on making our already-amazing support even better; without a plan, agenda or even a map. What we’ve decided is that FreshBookers are really really smart, and when you find yourself with a critical mass of smart people, awesome things will almost certainly happen, if you just remove the barriers to them getting things done.
So, for this week, nobody will be assigned tasks. Nobody will be answerable for how they spend their time, nobody will have to attend meetings they don’t want to attend, and everybody is going to do exactly whatever they think they ought to do in order to make FreshBooks Support even better than it already is.
I have no idea what’s going to come of this, but I’m sure excited to find out.
To kick off Support Support Week, we gathered the crew together this morning and, using giant sticky notes, put up ideas on how to make Support better. We covered a kitchen wall with these ideas — along with a raft of smaller stickies with which folks signed up to help make a given idea a reality.
We’ll keep checking in to see how various ideas are doing throughout the week, and share some of the awesomeness as it emerges into the light.
Quick note to let you know you’ll find the FreshBooks office closed this coming Monday, May 24, for what is officially known as the Victoria Day holiday here in Canada.
All our systems will still be monitored 24 hours a day and you shouldn’t have any problems getting into your FreshBooks account. We’ll all be bouncing back in Tuesday morning, refreshed from the long weekend and ready to tackle your toughest questions.
If you’re outside Canada and wondering about the post title, this holiday is commonly known as the May Two-Four weekend. It usually falls on or around May 24 (duh) and is typically celebrated with the aid of one (or more) “two-fours” of beer (a double-case of 24 bottles). This is our big kick-off for Summer, when many Canadians open up their lakeside cottages for the season, head to the beach, or gather with friends and family for BBQ and fireworks.
Queen Victoria points the way to the beer store
Totally appropriate that we should celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday with a drinkfest, given that she’s reported to have once said:
“Give my people plenty of beer, good beer and cheap beer, and you will have no revolution among them”
Have a good, safe weekend, whatever you’re up to. Talk to you on Tuesday.
One of the worst things that can happen to any freelancer or small business is a computer crash. Losing critical client info, your writing, your designs, or your bookkeeping files can have a seismic impact on your ability to run your business.
Just imagine you dropped your beloved Powerbook right now, completely frying the hard drive – how much of the essential stuff you rely on every day would you lose?
Buying a great big backup drive might seem the best kind of insurance against this, but I’ve learned from hard experience there is a better way: trust in the cloud.
Head in the Clouds by Flickr user jpeepz
OK, sounds a bit like an obvious pitch setup. Let’s step back a bit; then I’ll explain.
For freelancers and small business owners, the traditional way to set things up when you’re first going it alone follows a predictable pattern. You get your computer, a printer, and perhaps a smartphone. Then you start loading up with all the software you think you’ll need to run things.
You’ll probably install the usual office apps (word processing, spreadsheet, etc.), something to run your email and calendar, and maybe an accounting package to keep your books in order.
The weeks and months go by and your business is growing. You’ve been churning out stuff like crazy – proposals, estimates, bills, project plans, document drafts and designs spread across your hard drive. As your contact list, your pipeline, and the volume of work all grow, all those bits and bytes on your computer become a significant asset. They’re the heart of your business now; the work product upon which you’re building your reputation.
Stop and think: if all of that essential data was to suddenly disappear, how would you keep things going?
Even if you’re just using a big ol’ spreadsheet to track who you’ve billed and for what – not having access to that basic information can mean the difference between getting paid and going broke.
Computers fail. Hard drives die, power supplies crap out. Even if you think you’re backing things up properly, just imagine your dog’s tail swats the bigass external drive off the desk while you’re running a huge backup, wiping out thousands of digital photos, hundreds of thousands of written words.
In case you’re wondering: this specific example happened to me. Except I can’t even blame an eager, tail-wagging puppy – I tripped my own dumb arse over the power cord of the 500 Gig drive while it was running. I lost everything. I can’t begin to tell you how miserable this was. We lost thousands of photos from the early years of our three kids, not to mention over a decade of collected writing and presentations.
And this is just one episode. Maybe I just have really bad hardware karma, but over the years, I’ve fragged more hard drives than I care to recall. Each time, it’s been a nightmare to try to piece things back together again. I’ve even had a situation where I’d been diligently backing up onto an external drive every night and archiving that onto CDs too, only to find that the backups were somehow corrupted and all my archive data was pretty much useless. Gah!
And then… I discovered the cloud.
In the last few years, I’ve steadily moved almost everything off my laptop and into the trusted hands of online providers. Starting with my email and digital photos, then documents, presentations, my music, financial records – it all lives, or is backed up, in the cloud. In fact, I now feel like Victor Kiam in the old Remington ads: I liked the cloud so much, I joined the company (FreshBooks’ entire service is 100% cloud-based).
I get kind of excited about this stuff and have converted my 73-year-old Dad, among others, to the cloud. But when I first talk to people about relying on the cloud, there’s a common set of objections that seem to come up. Security is the big thing, then the feeling that because all your stuff is “out there” rather than “right here” you somehow have less access. Other people raise the question of cost.
Here’s the thing: I think these three objections are actually the top three reasons you should go with the cloud. For everything.
Here’s why:
1. Security
If you have any concerns about data security, I’d argue that your data is, in fact, MORE secure in the cloud than stored on your own computer.
Think about it: the people who build big cloud-based apps and storage systems have to make huge investments in security, backups and data protection.
I now run entrust all my valuable data on three machines at home to an automatic cloud-based backup service called Mozy. It’s saved my bacon more than once already, and I love their “set it and forget it” way of working. I’m confident that whatever giant server farms they have, they’re a lot more powerful, more secure and better backed up than any external drive I could buy.
When I started working at FreshBooks, I learned that our customer’s data is always backed up in real time to three sources in two different locations, and backed-up to tape at an off-site location nightly. That’s way more protection than the average small business can afford to implement for themselves.
Plus, for the majority of cloud-based apps, the connection between the servers and your computer is encoded using 256-bit SSL encryption. If you’re smart and use a complex password, your important data is arguably less likely to be compromised if it’s stored online, compared to the risk that someone could steal your laptop at the coffee shop.
It might be just me, but I’m inclined to think there are a lot more petty villains lifting shiny laptops at *bux than there are sophisticated hackers trying to figure out the password for my PayPal account.
When you think about how fragile, how crash- and theft-prone your computer is, why wouldn’t you want the cloud looking after things for you? When was the last time you heard about Flickr crashing and losing thousands of photos?
2. Mobility
This seems obvious to me – if all your important stuff is online, you can access it anywhere you can find an Internet connection. Why wouldn’t you want that?
I know packrats and the paranoid feel the need to carry ever document they’ve ever written on their laptop at all times – trust me, I’ve been there too. But once you discover the cloud, you’ll be stunned how liberating it is.
With a service like Google Docs, I never have to worry about what’s on my hard drive, and it’s so much easier to share and collaborate with other team members. Sharing content is way easier when I can just send someone a link, instead of what happens when I attach a document.
Think about how stupidly inefficient attachments are: I’ve got a document on my machine, attach it to an email message, which creates a copy in my email Sent Items, plus a copy in your Inbox and then, probably, another copy on your desktop. Links don’t work in every situation, but they’re so much more elegant.
Plus, being cloud-based means I can access the same content from any of the computers at home, my main work laptop, my Blackberry or even my iPod Touch. The more stuff I put in the cloud, the more access I have.
3. Costs
Cloud-based systems typically work on a kind of rental model. The usual label is “Software As A Service”, but I like to think of it as Software At Your Service. It’s there when you want it, always up-to-date, and not consuming a ton of local system resources.
When you’re looking at the cost of running things locally compared to the cloud, you’ve got to think in terms of full-life costs.
Start with the price you’d pay for all the hardware and software you need right now – comparing the off-the-shelf products with the cost of cloud-based apps.
Then think about how your disk space needs will grow over time as you store more and more stuff. Add in the cost for a big backup drive, probably at least twice as big as all the hard drives in the computers you’re using. Then think about the cost of replacing that backup drive when it fills up or fails.
Oh, and then add in the cost to buy software upgrades as your applications get updated every year or so.
And don’t forget to look at the prices a lot of software vendors charge for online or phone support – you’re going to need some help one day, best to count that into your budgeting now. Many vendors offer prepaid annual support packages, or you can go with the pay-per-use support lines that charge $30 or more per call – either way, these costs start to add up pretty quickly.
Now run the same quick cost analysis for the cloud-based approach.
I won’t get into all the details here, but let’s work a couple of real quick examples – backup and office apps.
Backup: you can pick up a 1TB external backup drive for about $100 right now. There are some pretty sweet deals out there at places like TigerDirect. A whole freakin’ terabyte for less than a hundred bucks! If you want the ease, speed and convenience of having all your data backed up to something you can just plug into the back of your laptop, I say: do it.
But going back to everything I was saying above about the failure risk with local backup systems, I think you should look at the cloud too. My Mozy backup account, just as one example, costs me $52/year for unlimited storage space. I’ll say that again: fifty two bucks a year for as much storage as I can ever use. And I never have to remember to backup –it all happens automatically.
Office Apps: I know a few people who’ve made the switch to Google Apps for their home-based business and I’m sure this is the tip of a much bigger iceberg.
This is kind of a no-brainer: the Google Apps Premier Edition package includes Gmail for business, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Sites, and a bunch more for $50 per user per year, with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
Compare that to the cost of even a basic package of equivalent desktop apps – typically $150 to $400 per user.
And we haven’t even touched on the cost of software upgrades and maintenance over the full life of your system. Like most cloud-based providers, the Google guys roll out code updates, bug fixes and upgrades on the fly, ensuring everyone’s always using the best and most up-to-date version of the code. In 2009 alone, they launched more than 100 improvements to their Apps suite, and most of their customers probably didn’t even know stuff was getting fixed and upgraded in background – it’s just seamless.
I could go on and on about this stuff. Yeah, OK – so I guess I already did. I’ll shut up for now and let one of our customers have the final word. Check out this testimonial to cloud-based computing from a FreshBooks and Google Apps customer on the Official Google Enterprise Blog. Pretty compelling stuff, this cloud business.
Last part of a three part series – Accepting Online Payments: the Ultimate Guide. Part one covered Why You Want to Accept Online Payment. In part two, we discussed How Do Payment Gateways Work and How To Choose One?
If you’ve read the first two posts, you might be asking yourself, “great, thanks for all the information, but I’m still confused. Which gateway should I pick?”
To give you a better idea of the online payment gateways that integrate with FreshBooks, this last post in the series is a summary of the various options. If you have any specific questions about which one to choose, please feel free to contact us directly.
The big daddy of them all. PayPal has the advantage of being both incredibly useful and powerful while being easy to set up, all at the same time. The standard PayPal offering is free to use and it offers most very small businesses exactly what they need to start accepting payments online. It’s a great place to start if you are just doing a few credit card transactions a month. As your business grows, your PayPal account can be upgraded to add more features (for a monthly cost). There are three different flavours of PayPal that integrate with FreshBooks:
(Link: PayPal Standard)
Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re invoicing any clients in Ontario, British Columbia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, or Nova Scotia, you need to know how the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) works.
You may have to make changes in your FreshBooks account even before the July 1st, 2010 deadline.
We’ve put together a FreshBooks HST FAQ that goes through what you need to know, including changes you’ll need to make to your FreshBooks account.
In short, the old separate provincial sales taxes in Ontario and BC are being rolled together with the GST to create the new HST. Even though the HST rules are only being introduced in Ontario and British Columbia, they may still apply to your business, wherever you are in Canada. And you may need to apply HST before July 1, depending on your business.
Read the HST FAQ and, as always, contact us if you have any questions or comments.
For bonus points: we know HST actually stands for Harmonized Sales Tax – but what should it stand for?
Hockey Stick Tax…? Highly Suspect Tax…? Or perhaps it’s this thing:
Sure you can come up with some better suggestions…
This is a terrific question and one we get asked a lot, particularly by people starting up a business for the first time.
The quick answer: No! (But maybe: Yes!)
It depends on your business and your own comfort level, but for most small businesses chances are you really don’t need an accounting package.
Here’s what happens with a lot of people when they’re launching their small business: they’re getting themselves all hooked up with their office equipment, so they’ll pop into their local electronics superstore, buy a PC or Mac and a printer, get their copy of Microsoft Office, and throw in a shrink-wrapped “easy” accounting package, thinking they’ll be all set. How hard can it be?
I am Accountant by Flickr user Venn Diagram
Truth is: that accounting package is probably going to be complete overkill for the majority of small businesses. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the entire concept of general ledger accounting is completely unnecessary in many businesses in their early stages.
The key question would be: do you want to learn how to be an accountant, or do you just want to generate bills, keep track of who owes you money, and make sure your books are in good order for tax time?
It’s all a matter of focus.
FreshBooks is built to handle the day-to-day transactions of a business without requiring sophisticated accounting knowledge. We designed it to be simple, accurate and very fast.
Our focus is on getting you paid for the work you do. So we make it darn easy to generate bills, follow up with clients, allow them to pay easily by a variety of methods, track who owes you money, and run reports to keep tabs on how your business is doing.
Accounting products, even the simplified ones, start from an entirely different point of view. Their entire vocabulary, their context is completely different. Almost all accounting systems are going to be built around all of that double ledger, cash- or accrual-based bean-counting, balance sheets and income statements an actual accountant needs.
You’re just getting your business off the ground. You’re an expert at what you do. Do you really want to learn how to do all this other “accounting” stuff yourself?
I had this conversation with a potential client earlier this week and my point, in essence, was: while you’re busy building your contracting business, you’re probably going to hand over your books to an actual accountant once year (or maybe more often) anyway.
Your accountant will need your opening and closing bank balances, by month, and will then need a bunch of other info in order to do full “reconciliations” and ensure your books are all in order for tax and general reporting purposes.
In my experience (disclaimer: I’m not an accountant, so I may well be missing stuff here) an accountant needs:
- Profit/loss statement
- Revenue by Client
- Item/service Sales
- Expenses by Category
- Summary of taxes charged
ALL of those reports are produced as standard by FreshBooks. The missing bit – monthly bank reconciliations – is the kind of info it takes me about 10 minutes to pull down from my online banking in a neat little Excel spreadsheet.
As your business blossoms and grows, it’s entirely likely you’re going to reach the point where you need something bigger. We hope that you’re successful enough that you’ll get to the point where you want to hire your accountant on fulltime as your CFO.
At that stage, you might decide you do need an accounting system that’s more complex than what we offer. When that happens, we’ll celebrate your “graduation” and you’ll be happy knowing you can export everything you need from FreshBooks. We have a lot of customers who continue to run FreshBooks in tandem with an accounting package too – that’s a great option for many people.
We like accounting packages. In fact, we integrate with a whole bunch of them. We just don’t think everyone necessarily needs one right out of the gate.
In short: it’s a really wise move to have a good accountant among your business advisors but do you really want to be one yourself?
sends more invoices than there are 
