Archive:
January, 2011
2nd of two guest posts by Ben Hanna, the lead user interface designer of CouchSurfing.org which has no formal office. Part 1 covers their Remote Tool-set.
I work for CouchSurfing.org and we are 100% remote with no central office. We have 30 full time contributors spread over 15 time zones in every continent but Antarctica and have been working this way for over a year.
We have a great remote toolset, but it’s not enough to be successful. You also need good training and a solid understanding of remote work practices. This will serve much better, especially in the long-run. This is what how we follow.
Communication
Prompt response to incoming alerts and empathetic communication between team members is important since misunderstandings can occur easily via online mediums. This is especially true if your team is made up of people from many different cultures and languages. Ensuring that people have the chance to at least meet once virtually via video chat or voice is important so that they can feel each other out and learn who they are talking to. This keeps the human element intact.
Email Etiquette
Keep subjects short, and to the point. Think about AP style here. If the rest of the message doesn’t make it, can the recipient get the gist from the subject? This allows people to prioritize, and respond in kind. Read the rest of this entry »
Yes – we’re asking you! We’re planning some great posts for you over the next year, and we thought it would be a great idea to ask you what you want to see.
What kind of content or questions do you want answered? It can be about FreshBooks, tips, accounting, taxes, add-ons, culture, small business, support, startups, working at home or anything you want to learn about! We’d love to know what you want – so please post a topic you want covered in the comments.
And if you’ve ever wanted to write a guest post for Fresh Thinking, just send me an email.
Guest Post by Jeff Valair, Operations Manager at Airline Booking Software.
Someone once said, simplicity is luxury. If you’re hooked into FreshBooks, you probably consider yourself in the group that follows this motto.
Well, have you thought about using the FreshBooks API to make your life even easier? Have you even heard of it? Now, if you’re in the Software as a Service (SaaS) business such as ourselves, you might find this scribble rather appealing. That is, having FreshBooks do your dirty work with regards to automating invoicing — I can tell you it’s the cat’s meow.
The API is a gold mine for those luxury seeking, time-saving, individuals. We have leveraged FreshBooks to handle all our monthly billing, which consists of differing usage rates, all on the fly and all automated.
So how’d we do it?
First, a bit of the background. We are an airline reservations software business, applicable to any tour business for that matter. Our clients use our software to manage their schedules and book customers. All free from the hassle of maintaining their own database server. The final price our customers pay at the end of the month is based on usage. Okay, so get to the good stuff, where’s the savings? Read the rest of this entry »
Guest blogpost by Evelyn Bandoh, founder of EAB Creative Planning Services, LLC.
It’s a month into a new decade, stop making your life difficult and do something different. If what you did last year, last week, yesterday, or even two-hours ago did not work well, do something different. As simple as this sounds, the act of varying our habits and patterns can be hard to do. But I bet that mounting anxiety over the pile of paperwork is uncomfortable as well. Don’t want to be anxious? This bears repeating… Stop making your life difficult and do something different.
Doing something different first starts with recognizing which end of the spectrum you fall on. You either like dealing with the financial/administrative aspects of your business or you don’t. If you do- you could do something as simple as creating a folder system for each category of receipts and records. If you don’t, you could do something more complex such as installing a financial tracking system and hiring a bookkeeper/accountant to manage your books for you. Whatever it is that you choose, make sure that it supports you and the way that you do business. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you always ask yourself is this a business expense or not? And is it deductible? It’s a common question, especially as tax resources can be a little vague with definitions or by using obscure examples not relevant to your business. One tip is to use the business expense categories, hopefully offered by your local tax body, to categorize them as they incur. This allows you simply to evaluate them once the come in, saving you a lot time by avoiding the hours of documenting boxes of receipts.
What makes an expense deductible?
If the expenses can be attributed to you doing business, it most likely is deductible (at least partially). That’s essentially what the IRS states as deductible business expenses as they….
…must be both ordinary and necessary. An ordinary expense is one that is common and accepted in your industry. A necessary expense is one that is helpful and appropriate for your trade or business.
Do understand that? In normal language, ordinary expenses are fairly simple, they’re the business expenses typical of your industry, and that you probably think of business expenses. Necessary expenses would be better defined as costs required for your business to succeed, such as traveling to a client or tools used (such as FreshBooks) to make your business a success. They need to be both of these for them to a be a tax deductible expense.
Sample categories
The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) gives an example list that helps get you started (workable for businesses in other countries as well or US Expense Categories here). If you can easy qualify them into one of these categories, they’re likely an ordinary expenses and necessary so you should be able to deduct them. If you have your own sample list, please link them in the comments below. Read the rest of this entry »
1st of two guest posts by Ben Hanna, the lead user interface designer of CouchSurfing.org which has no formal office. Part 2 covers the team’s Habits and Strategies of their “working environment”.
I work for CouchSurfing.org and we are 100% remote with no central office. We have 30 full time contributors spread over 15 time zones in every continent but Antarctica, and have been working this way for over a year.
Our critical tool-set consists of:
Basecamp: Basecamp is a project collaboration and task management service. It has proven to be a valuable asset as it allows for file sharing, to-do lists, collaboration, and time tracking. Since not everyone is online at one time, we can work in batches, then pass tasks on to the next time zone when we log off.- Google Apps: Google Apps is great as it offers three products we use, Google Docs, Gmail and Google Talk / Chat. We use Google Docs to create documents that allow for multiple people to work on the same file at the same time and share ideas. It also makes spreadsheets and sharing presentations simple. Gmail takes care of our email and makes it easy to create and manage new and old email addresses. And finally, Google Talk / Chat allows us to communicate with each other via voice and text while working on projects.
- Skype: Skype is great for impromptu discussions and voice chat one on one. However, it fails with larger numbers of people. It also keeps a long chat history with search-able text, which is useful. And lastly, it has simple but effective screen sharing.
TeamSpeak: TeamSpeak offers group voice chat software, that has a higher group limit than Skype (24 people), which makes it perfect for company wide meetings. It further allow us to set up different “rooms” for virtual conferences with different encryption and bandwidth levels. And finally it has push to talk functionality to limit bandwidth use.- Campfire: Campfire is 37signals based web chat that integrates with Basecamp, but is also a great standalone. When used with Fluid App for Mac, it becomes a powerful chat client that can do inline image and code display. We even use it for visual mock-ups and idea creation.
Dropbox: We use Dropbox to share files, back up work, and keep documents secure. We can remove documents from someone’s folder if they no longer need access and it keeps everyone up to date by syncing.- Freshbooks: FreshBooks allows us to easily manage contractor’s billing, hours, and work. Each contractor sends invoices in via FreshBooks and we can automatically pay them and keep track.
- TrackRecord: TrackRecord is a a Basecamp plugin that allows individuals to record time spent on tasks and easily update their time online.
- Email: This is changing, as we move to more group discussion on Basecamp – but email is still the go to tool for one-to-one communication if we are not on a chat client together.
On the tech/development side we utilize:
SVN / GIT: Both these products keep our file system up to date and maintain our code base, but do things each a little differently.- VMware / VirtualBox: Both provide virtual machines that allow us to keep running identical copies of our system on everyone’s computers. In one update, we can all migrate to the newest version.
Those are all the tools we use to help us work without an office, but it takes a lot more than tools to make us successful. In the next post, I’ll cover our Habits and Strategies for working without an office.
Ben Hanna is the lead user interface designer of CouchSurfing.org which has no formal office. CouchSurfing.org is a worldwide network for making connections between travelers and the local communities they visit.
We’re super excited to be on The Huffington Post’s list of Most Underrated Innovations of 2010. The other innovations include Mobile Payments, Netflix and Pummelvision, which makes this is a truly great recognition and we’re honored.
It’s also a great article. So why not take some time to read about some of the other really cool underrated innovations of 2010. And here’s what they had to say about FreshBooks:
#4 — FreshBooks, enough to invoice a big gun
FreshBooks, a cloud-based small business bookkeeping service, made it to this list via recommendation from Eilene Zimmerman, startups, entrepreneurship and innovative tech writer, who noted, “I was amazed that I could invoice like a big gun –for free–and it’s right there online.” I could invoice a big gun? Hm. I’m sold!
At 1:23am EDT Sunday morning (Jan. 23, 2011), FreshBooks experienced an outage until 1:46am EDT. The service has since been working normally.
What happened?
Our hosting provider was experiencing a network problem in our Chicago datacenter which took FreshBooks off the air. If the problem had continued longer, FreshBooks would have transferred to its second datacentre to keep the service running smoothly.
We put a high value on always being there for you, and are truly sorry for the inconvenience. If this outage affected you, please contact us and we will try to make it up to you.
If you’re getting fed-up or bored at your current job, you’ve probably considered switching to freelance work or even starting your own business. Compared to reporting to the office for the daily grind, operating from home and controlling your work day can is a great alternative — but is it really? While working for yourself does offer many great benefits, the lifestyle isn’t for everyone. If you’re going to take the plunge, you must be realistic about your expectations and confront these 5 big myths about freelancing or starting your own business.
Working From Home Means Less Work
Whether you take on freelance work or start your own business, you will likely begin your new working career from home. A popular misconception about this lifestyle is you will not have to work as hard or as long as if you were to work in an office environment. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Especially when running your own business, you will often need to work longer hours than you would at an office.
Entrepreneurs-Journey, a blog dedicated to helping first-time entrepreneurs prepare for the lifestyle changes such a career brings, offers the same forewarning. “I am trapped to checking my email day in and day out, 24 hours a day,” the site owner admits. “Early on you will most likely carry the show and until you can justify hiring others.” Of course, this won’t be the case forever, and be sure to be discipline with your weekly time so you be as efficient as possible working from home.
(image source)
Working From Home Is Easier
The work-at-home fantasy often includes images of kicking back at the home PC, wearing pajamas all day and sipping coffee as the money rolls in. With no boss hawking over your shoulder, you can blast the music you want to hear and take breaks whenever the urge so strikes you. In some ways, this is true, but it is important to realize that there are many challenges to working at home that can make the setup just as torturous as cubicleville. As Harvard MBA John Reed points out, “self-employment equals self-discipline.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Guest Blogpost by Eric Mathews, author of thatbookkeeper.com.
During the 34 years I’ve been around, I have come to the realization that I am an anomaly. When I was 14, and my friends were sleeping in or going to the pool, I spent the mornings of my summer vacation at my mom’s office. They needed a clerk since someone had just quit, and I was hired on for the summer. I spent hours pouring over ridiculously large printouts, recalculating each column and looking for errors. If that wasn’t enough of a deterrent, the $4/hour I made should have been. Yet somehow, I loved it.
It turns out that most people don’t find accounting interesting. In fact, it’s usually the part of running a small business that owners hate the most. Despite this, many entrepreneurs begrudgingly toil over their books for hours on end, often coming out with no better understanding of their business than when they started. Does this sound like you? Have you been putting off outsourcing this work? Maybe it’s time to delegate this task to someone who actually enjoys it. Here are 3 reasons to consider hiring a bookkeeper.
1. Lack of time
No matter how hard we try to extend it, a day will always contain 24 hours. If a petition ever went around, asking for the day to go to 30 hours, I’d be the first to sign it. Until then, there are just so many things we can accomplish each day. If you are trying to juggle sales, marketing, shipping, and bookkeeping at once, something is going to suffer. There is nothing more important to an entrepreneur (especially when they are the only employee) than effective time management. Spending 5 hours doing a bank reconciliation that would take a bookkeeper 30 minutes just doesn’t make sense. Sure, it’s an extra cost each month, but how many more sales could you have made in those 5 hours? Which scenario is really costing you more money?
Read the rest of this entry »
sends more invoices than there are 
