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5 Tips for Independent Biz Owners to Increase Repeat Business

Guest author: Erik Folgate writes about business and financial topics on Money Crashers

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New: Quickly view or mark your invoice as sent with hover over

From time to time you may have an invoice in your FreshBooks account that doesn’t need to be sent via email. Maybe you hand delivered it; maybe you just need it for record keeping. Now there’s an easy way to keep your invoice status up-to-date, with “Mark as Sent.”

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As always, if you have any feedback, please let us know so we can make FreshBooks better!

Contest: Win a ticket to Media Bistro Career Circus in NYC

Are you looking to do some personal development and learn from some career management experts?  Well, you’re in luck because we’re giving away a pass to the Media Bistro Career Circus on August 4th in New York City!

The Media Bistro Career Circus is a one-day event focused on teaching you techniques to better manage your career. Our Head of Magic, Saul Colt is a participating speaker and will be talking about how to use social media to advance your career.

The Media Bistro Career Circus will be packed with useful information on everything from perfecting your CV to creating your personal brand. The event will no doubt be a great place to network with some smart people and connect with experts in how to make your work life more satisfying.

How to Win

Tell us your advice for turning what you love to do into a career by leaving a comment below or tweeting us @freshbooks.

And for those of you who can’t make it to NYC, share your advice and you could win a $50 Apple store credit!

Enter by 3:00PM EST, Friday July 29th and we’ll pick a random winner from our favorite submissions.

The sun is trying to kill us

Friends, let’s take a pause from our daily work of helping you get paid for doing the things you love to do and focus on an enemy far greater than unpaid account receivables.

The sun is trying to kill us.

It is really freaking hot here in North America right now. Average temperatures outside the FreshBooks office are going above 38C, which is over 100F for our American friends.

That’s hotter than a human body. If you think about it, your armpit is actually cooling down the air.

As a public service announcement, here are a few tips to help you survive the heat:

• Sunproof your house. Close your blinds. Open the upstairs windows.
• Stay hydrated. With ice. Lots of ice. Avoid sugar, caffeine and alcohol as they will dehydrate you.
• Escape! Catch a movie. Go to the mall.
• Lower your laptop temperature. Turn off your computer when you don’t need it. Put it into a lower power setting to create less heat.
• Workation! If you work virtually, why not head to somewhere colder? Drag the laptop to Starbucks. Or the public library. Or even just the basement.
• Cool your car. Roll down the windows. Use a windshield reflector. According to this source, rolling down a window and opening and closing the opposite door 5 times is highly effective.
• Siesta. Why else do you work for yourself? Sleep in the afternoon, work at night. Let your employees siesta too!
• Visualize relief. Change your desktop wallpaper to a cold, freezing, chilling winter scene.
• Work in the buff! It may be a bit weird to call a client au naturel, but it’s better than fainting!
• Ice cream for dinner. Great idea or greatest idea?

Caption contest

Our poor friend the snowman (pictured) is melting in the sun – send us your best caption for this image – and quick, before he melts completely!

Update: tell us what the melting snowman is saying by today, Friday July 22nd at Noon EST!

We’ll reward the winning caption idea (from Twitter and the comments) with a $30 giftcard from Starbucks to get you all the iced cappuccinos you need to stay cool.

Late payments plague small business…with an asterisk

USA TODAY published an interesting article on how small businesses are getting paid slower year over year, entitled “Late payments plague small business.” The article analyzes the results of a recent survey from the National Federation of Independent Business. The study finds that small businesses are:

receiving payments an average of 48 days after invoicing in 2011. That’s a six-day increase over last year, and 10 days more than in 2006.

When it comes to independent businesses, cashflow is important, and getting paid quickly is essential to running a successful business. In fact, we ran the numbers in FreshBooks to see how long it has been taking for FreshBooks users to get paid.

Not to toot our own horns but, Beep Beep. In 2010, FreshBooks users, on average, got their invoices paid in 26 days! Based on over 2.5 million users, this number was 4 days faster than in 2009 and 6 days faster than in 2008. Since we actually promise to get business owner’s paid faster, we’re all pretty jazzed to see our numbers report well above average for users.

So to quote Rapper and Poet Rakim (of Eric B and Rakim):  “Stop smiling, be still, don’t nuthin move but the money,“ we ask you….Are you getting paid faster?

Do you have any great stories of moving money you can share in the comments?

Infographic: Why do people become freelancers?

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Mentors are key to a successful career

Mentorship can help both new and established small business owners move on to the next step in their careers. Who better to help you get to the place you need to go than someone who’s already there? Mentors can help you move past a plateau, expose you to new clients, and generally help you get your foot in the door (and sometimes even help you step through). The key is finding the one that suits you and your career objectives and that means taking steps to plan for what you want out of the relationship.

Do your Research

When looking for a mentor, FreelanceSwitch advises that it’s important to do your homework. That means that you’ll need to find out the answers to “newbie questions” on your own.  Have a specific list of questions that you can draw from and make sure to tailor them to the mentor’s background; there’s nothing worse than wasting your time asking questions that a quick Google search can answer.

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When you do what you love, you do your best work

Freelancers have it pretty good. Although there are downsides to every job (and as jobs go, the freelancing rating scale goes to 11), many freelancers are self-employed because they’re committed to doing something they love. It’s not surprising that this has an impact not only on how much they enjoy their work lives but also on life outlook too. In fact, a recent survey showed the majority of freelancers are happier since they started freelancing. It’s a simple notion, and a topic dear to our heart that we keep finding is true: When you do what you love, you do your best work.

Boosting Productivity

Working in a field that fuels your passion is one of the easiest ways to increase productivity. It’s a common tendency to put more effort into something you love doing than something you don’t. If you have a hobby, consider how much time and effort you put into it. When your work is as enjoyable as your hobbies, then you’ll put that same kind of time and effort into your projects, and the productivity gains will show. In fact, Lifehack’s 50 Ways To Increase Your Productivity lists “Love what you do” as the fifth item!

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TechTalksTO full-day developer conference set for August 13th

For the past year or so, FreshBooks has been proud to sponsor TechTalksTO, an ongoing speaker series for software developers in the Toronto Area. We’ve held several great talks featuring speakers from Twitter, Twilio, Well.ca, Joyent and more!

This summer, the TechTalksTO team has pulled out all the stops and arranged a full-day developer conference in August, to be held at the Toronto Underground Cinema.

The day will feature talks from six great speakers from the global web development community and a kicking after-party.

Speaker Lineup:

• Mathias Meyer (@roidrage) – Author of the NoSql Handbook
• Timothy Fitz (@timothyfitz) – Known for popularizing Continuous Deployment
• Aaron Quint (@aq) – Creator of sammy.js and CTO of Paperless Post
• Ben Vinegar (@bentlegen) – Front-End engineer at disqus.com
• Rick Olson (@technoweenie) – GitHub Alchemest and Rails core committer
• Aaron Peterson (@metaxis) – Technical Evangelist at OpsCode, the creators of Chef

Keep an eye on the TechTalksTO website for more details, speaker bios, talk synopses, and details about the after-party as they are revealed. You can also follow @techtalksto on Twitter for updates.

Tickets are CAD$150, and are On Sale Now.

See more from FreshBooks developers on the Dev blog

5 Tricks to Building Realistic Summer Schedules

Summer chillin

It’s summer! Along with the warmer weather, summer also means packed schedules as invites to family BBQs, kids home from school and all those other little house projects ‘on hold until July’ all start competing for your time.

But when your work also remains steady throughout this season, how can you get more done in less time? Or, at the very least, how do you ensure work projects don’t get pushed down the list? From removing clutter from your desk as productivity expert Leo Babauta suggests, to Time Management Guru Chase Smith’s practical advice about scheduling your day, there are (thankfully) some easy-to-adopt tricks to staying focused and keeping productivity up amidst summer distractions.

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