Archive:
August, 2011
Want to improve your business? These 4 new Add-ons for FreshBooks will instantly let you measure your time, give insights into your business, sum up your business results and improve how you stay in touch with your potential and current clients. As your business grows, Add-ons let you connect your FreshBooks account to all sorts of wonderful services to expand your workflow and improve how you run your business.
Here’s a quick look at the latest Add-ons for FreshBooks and how they can help:
Chrometa is a timer that automatically captures the time you’re spending on your work. The timer runs in the background and records what documents you’re working on, what websites you’re researching, and for how long. All of this gets pushed automatically into your Chrometa account, which you can export to FreshBooks as time entries.
GeckoBoard is a status board that helps you keep track of your business in real time. You can put together various dashboard widgets to create the ideal interface to help you run your business. Add a FreshBooks widget to your dashboard to view the number of invoices you’ve created, and how much your clients owe you.
Easy Insight helps you report on how your business is doing. Connect to tools like FreshBooks, choose what metrics to measure, and define what benchmarks you want to measure them against. You can import invoice totals, hours tracked, payments and expenses from FreshBooks for your reports.
Active Campaign lets you easily build email newsletters to stay in touch with your clients. Choose from a list of templates, or build your newsletter from scratch, then drop in your content and you’re ready to go. When you’re ready to send your newsletter, import your client list from FreshBooks to create your mailing list in Active Campaign and send out your newsletter.
Don’t forget that there are tons of other great Add-ons in the Add-on Directory. Have a look and discover how you can get more out of FreshBooks, and if you don’t find what you’re looking for, tell us what Add-ons could really help your business by requesting an Add-on!
Sonja Jacob, owner of the Cultivated Word in Boston, MA, sat down with us to talk about running her own business and being small but ever so mighty.
The Cultivated Word from FreshBooks on Vimeo.
The Cultivated Word is a boutique creative services agency specializing in animated video production, content development and strategy, copywriting, and branding. Their work has been nominated for a Mashable Open Web Award, was named to Marketing Sherpa’s Viral Hall of Fame 2009, and has also been recognized by the Web Marketing Association.
FreshBooks’ Kasey Bayne, our smiling Accounting Ambassador, has been recognized by CPA Practice Advisor as a Top 40 under 40. It’s great to have one of our own recognized by the accounting community and to be amongst the other award winners who are “helping to positively shape the accounting and tax profession.” Over the past year, Kasey has been working closely with accountants and their small business clients, to help them both focus more on what they love to do. The program is called Beancounters United.
Executive Editor M. Darren Root of CPA Practice Advisor, sums up the honor best:
These 40 professionals are among the most dedicated to developing and applying innovative and creative approaches to solving practice needs.
Be sure to read the great interview with Kasey printed in CPA Practice Advisor’s Forty under Forty.
Ever wanted a way of knowing your anticipated income on a project?
Your Timesheet Details report (in the “Reports” tab) now shows more detail about your estimated earnings to help you keep up on your projects.
The Timesheet Details report features a new column called Estimated Billing, which calculates how much all of your billable hours are worth based on the billing method you have set (task rate, project rate, contractor re-bill rate, etc.). You can even hover over the Estimated Billing amount to see how that amount was calculated for each row. Non-billable hours will show up as N/A.
Team Timesheets has also been enhanced. The Team Timesheets report can now be switched to view billable or non-billable hours or both to give you a complete picture of your team’s time.
Please let us know your feedback in the comments below.
UPDATE (Aug. 26, 2011 11:00am EST): After receiving comments from you, our users, we’re going to switch the Timesheet Details Report back to its old columns that did not include the new Estimated Billing column. After this has been updated, a new report will be created that includes Estimated Project Billing. We apologize and please bear with us while we make the changes.
UPDATE (Sept. 7, 2011, 9:20am EST): Based on your feedback, the Estimated Billing column on the TimeSheet Details report has been removed and added into an entirely new report, returning the Timesheet Details report to its original form. To see how much your billable hours are worth, using your billing rate, please go the reports tab and you will see the new Estimated Billing report under TimeSheet Reports.
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Hear from Brad Dunn, Director of nazori, a creative technology firm based in Melbourne, Australia. An avid supporter of FreshBooks and cloud software, Brad explains how to build an amazing team, being picky about your clients and the importance of getting rid of egos.
Tell us about your business and why you do it?
The nazori business is as simple as they come. We help companies use new technology. Sometimes we build customers their own mobile applications, and sometimes we’ll help them integrate with something that already exists which we think will meet their needs. Our customers are stunned by how simple things can be. 2 years ago, they’d only be offered a $10k–20k server package with no alternative.
We embraced cloud technology from day one and aren’t interested in selling a ton of physical equipment just to stay in business. We found that people find it hard to get their heads around technology when it’s not their core business, and when it keeps changing so quickly. At last, we can offer those same solutions for a tenth of the price, with a thousand times more reliability. Instead of shifting tin to stay in business, we’ve found telling people the truth about what could work best for them has a lot more value, both for us and our clients.
How do you approach each day?
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Cowboys and cowgirls, it’s that time of year again; when cattle roam free and votes for SXSW are tallied.
What’s SXSW?
SXSW, standing for South by South West, is a music, film and interactive conference and festival that happens every year in Austin, Texas. The event brings together awesome folks from all over the world to discuss and discover new ideas related to digital culture, multimedia and music. If you’ll be attending, please get in touch as we’d to love to see you there!
SXSW is always an amazing time so we’re excited to be heading down again in 2012. Our panels are now up for voting so if, perchance, we’re covering topics that interest you, please take a moment and add your vote. Your help is much appreciated, as every vote counts! Check out our proposed panel descriptions after the jump.
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Sure, working more hours is the hallmark of reaching the entrepreneurial threshold, but how can you make sure that you won’t burn out by the sixth month? In this first installment of our 3-part “Becoming a Business Owner” series, you’ll find out how to create a successful enterprise while keeping yourself sane, balanced and happy in the process:
Commit to a Mission Statement
A mission statement is a key part of formalizing your goals and solidifying your strategy for keeping your business on track. In fact, it’s so important, it’s recommended that you set aside time to work on your statement several times a week. That way, if or when you get off track in building your enterprise, you’ll have a handy road map that you can always look to for guidance.
Entrepreneur magazine suggests answering the following questions in your statement as creatively as possible:
1. Why are you in business?
2. Who are your customers?
3. What image of your business do you want to convey?
4. What level of service do you provide?
5. What roles do you and your employees play?
6. What kind of relationships will you maintain with suppliers?
7. How do you differ from your competitors?
8. How will you use technology, processes, and services to reach your goals?
9. What underlying philosophies or values guided your responses to the previous questions?
Don’t Expect Perfection
Career expert Kaya Singer puts it this way: “Allow your business to be a work in progress and let go of expectations that cause stress and anxiety.” Prioritize your work; make sure that the things that need to get done get done first, and that others of less importance get done later, or imperfectly. Sometimes, it’s necessary to quickly categorize, based on a meticulous cost-benefit analysis, but for a general prioritizing scheme, try a system like Covey’s Time Management Matrix that helps you instantly sort what is urgent/important. You can’t expend all of your energy on every task, so don’t try. Delegate, discard, or do it quickly and move on.
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HackVAN kicks off this Saturday, August 20 at the Mozilla headquarters in beautiful downtown Vancouver.
HackDays are fantastic events, and at HackVAN, just $10 gets you get a full day’s worth of hacking, app-building, and hilarity. You’ll even be fed and provided with beer! If you’re a developer who loves to build things, this event is a must.
A number of great companies have lined up to provide their APIs for you to use, like TinEye, FreshBooks (of course), Yellow Pages, ContextIO, Shopify and Twilio. Your mission is to build an all-new application using one or more of those APIs. You’ll have from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm to build your application — and if you’re looking for collaborators you might very well find some on the day. Folks come from all over to join these HackDays events, so you’ll get to meet like-minded hackers and even try working together.
There are prizes galore: a MacBook Air, an iPad2 and a Kindle 3G all await the best applications delivered at the end of the day. So come out, sign up, and hack your heart out!
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