Since the earliest days we’ve reached out by phone to survey FreshBooks customers and understand the benefits our service delivers. One of the first things people told us was “FreshBooks has changed my behavior”. To this day this comment scares me - bad software changes behavior. Inevitably though, the next thing they’d say is “now I send invoices as I do my work because it is so fast and easy - I don’t put it off till the end of the month anymore”. This insight still blows me away.

I call this changed behavior “continuous invoicing” and it has some amazing benefits:

1. Get Paid Faster - think about it. If it is mid-month and you just finished a job and you wait until the end of the month to invoice, you are going to send the invoice two weeks later and therefore get paid two weeks later. Contrast this with sending the same invoice right away, and you get paid two weeks sooner.

2. Collect More Money - if you invoice soon after completing your work, your work is fresh in your mind you will invoice for more dollars. When you wait to invoice you tend to forget some details. On top of this everyone undervalues their own services, and this effect increases over time. Between these two things you will wind up billing for less. Everyone will - it’s human nature. So, invoice immediately and you will bill for more money.

3. Improved Client Relations - when a client receives an invoice soon after their job is completed, the value you offer will be fresh in their mind. If you’ve done a great job (and we trust you always do!) that great work will be top of mind in your client’s consciousness. As a result they will get right to the process of paying you. When you send an invoice 2-3 weeks later, the context of your great work is lost and may seem far away to to them. So, invoice early and make them happy to pay you.

These are the benefits of continuous invoicing. Looking for a painfully cheesy catch-phrase that’s worth it’s wait in gold? “Remember folks, invoice early and invoice often.”

FreshBooks is in the market for a couple of crack web developers, and if you connect us with a winning candidate, we’ll write you a cheque for a $1000 CDN (we figure it’s better to reach out to you folks than recruiters, and we’re thinking giving you some incentive to BCC your entire address book (hint, hint ) is not such a bad thing).

You can read the web developer job description here. To be clear the role is full time on-site here in beautiful Toronto Canada, and we only hire outstanding people with amazing attitudes.

If you want to learn a little more about the culture and characters here at FreshBooks, check out this “hiring video” (shown below as well) or check out our Roadburn RV trip.

Thanks for any and all assistance you can provide.

P.S. We’re also hiring a seasoned agile web development manager. If you help us fill that role, same bounty applies.

One thing I hear occasionally from our users, especially Web professionals, is that running a bunch of browser-based apps at once can be a particular pain when the browser decides to misbehave. OS X users have our time-tracking widget to take care of one task, but that leaves out some popular operating systems — and a lot of FreshBooks features beyond time tracking.

Enter Prism, Mozilla Labs’ browser integration experiment. Prism, based on the Firefox web browser, lets you run web applications like FreshBooks (or Gmail or anything else on the web) in their own window and process, acting like a desktop app unaffected by browser restarts.

Getting started with Prism is easy: download the version for your operating system, install, and run. It’ll ask you for the URL and name of the Web app you want to encapsulate, and where you’d like a shortcut to the new “program” put. Put in your FreshBooks login page URL, name it “FreshBooks”, choose a shortcut location, click OK, and then run the resulting shortcut, and next thing you know, you’ve got a standalone FreshBooks app. Here’s a screenshot of me tracking time in a FreshBooks Prism window, while I do important corporate intelligence work in my browser:

If I were to quickly close the browser when Levi came by my desk expecting me to be working, the time tracking window (and the minimized FreshBooks main window) would stay running!

Prism is still experimental software, but it’s held up well while I’ve been trying it out (although I’ve heard that the Firefox 3 extension is less reliable than the standalone installer). As long as you’ve got Internet access, it makes web-based apps feel like they’re local, letting you restart your browser at will without having to wait until you’re done with your invoicing, mail, instant messaging, photo editing, and everything else you end up doing on the Web.

When you log time in FreshBooks, every once in a while we’ll hit you with an offbeat “humorous” success message. For example, we most often return a message that says, “hours logged”. Occasionally you will get a “bingo!”, or a “pow!” or “hours flogged”. We recently got a complaint that the funny stuff does not come around too often in the forums, so Daniel started a thread asking for messages “suggestions”.

Well…long story short, Erin from BrightMix upped the game and went ahead and built a GreaseMonkey script that allows you to build and customize all your messages.

How to get your own custom messages:
Step 1: Use FireFox
Step 2: Download GreaseMonkey
Step 3: Download the Script
Step 4: Add custom messages to script as needed

Go here to read the post and download the scripts. Thanks Erin!

I am sort of obsessed with focus. Our long time advisor Bill Mann once said, ‘gentlemen, there’s a four letter word in business: “focus”‘.Much of my time here at FreshBooks is spent thinking about what opportunities not to pursue, instead thinking about the ones we can. So when I came across this quote by Steve Jobs in the March 17th edition of Fortune, I thought I’d share:

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.

Amen brother.

One of the things I am going to be writing about in the coming weeks and months is pending economic downturn, and what it means to the kinds of professionals we serve at FreshBooks, including things you can do to brace yourself and your business for stormy weather.

Looks like the LA Times beat me to the punch though in this article titled, “For small businesses, when the going gets tough, get tough on costs“.

Here is the excerpt that mentions FB:

Use technology efficiently

Consider online accounting software, videoconferencing and online processes for more efficient operations.

Entertainment lawyer Lindsay Spiller, who splits his time between his San Francisco office and Los Angeles, uses an online invoicing and time-tracking service to cut costs at his 4-year-old firm while maintaining a professional image.

The Web-based service from FreshBooks in Toronto gives small-business owners and freelancers a relatively inexpensive and easy way to bill clients from anywhere, he said.

“With the click of a button I can send an invoice to my client, and they receive a very nice-looking, professional-looking invoice that makes it also easy for them to pay,” Lindsay said.

Thanks for being our spokesperson Lindsay!

We often get asked for local references from the media. If you’d like to tell the press why you love FreshBooks, drop Saul a line and let him know where you are located why you’d be a good person to tell folks what’s great about FB.

This morning we deployed a new release: Version 4.4 which we’re calling “Footloose”. Why footloose? In honor of Daniel who broke his ankle a month ago and just got his cast removed.

What’s in this Release?

Better tracking of billed hours. Prior to this release, we relied on date ranges to figure out which of your timesheet hours were billed or unbilled. This caused problems if you logged hours the same day you created an invoice. Now we track exactly which hours appear on what invoices, making the process much more intelligent and user-friendly.

Sexy login pages. Your login pages now feature your system colors, and your company’s logo!

Complete list of currency codes. FreshBooks now includes all currency codes and symbols, and when you choose a currency, we’ll pre-populate the symbol.

Time Tracking Widgets. We recently launched our own Mac OS X widget for tracking time, and pointed out that Goran – a FreshBooks community member – has built a Windows desktop time tracker.

There are more details about the release inside the application. Be sure to click the “4.4” link at the bottom of your account for more information – especially as they pertain to how we are handling logged hours – past and on a go forward basis.

Happy Monday.

When you are a founder it can be hard to imagine your business running the way you want it to once you grow past a certain team size — you fear the magic will be lost. We continue to be cautious and methodical about growth at FreshBooks for this reason, but a big piece of our next growth step fell into place this January, and for the first time we have confidence we can grow beyond a team of 15 without losing the magic. How you ask? Thanks to Mitch Solway.

Mitch is a marketing veteran. He started working on his marketing chops at Proctor and Gamble — arguably the best outfit in the world to learn management and traditional marketing acumen. But I’d say Mitch is a little restless at heart, and he needed to be somewhere more nimble and faster growing, so he left for Lavalife where he was employee number one in the marketing department. He stayed for nine years. He left as their VP marketing, managing a team of 27 with 6 direct reports, and in the process turned Lavalife into Canada’s household name for online dating — like Match.com or eHarmony in the USA.

What a business needs to grow are pillars to build on, and those pillars are people — more specifically great managers. After doing some consulting last year with us, we knew Mitch would be a great and timely fit for FreshBooks. He’s an ace demand generation marketer, a great people manager, and he’d done it before. Sadly he was committed to other projects, but by the end of the year we were able to convince him that FreshBooks was the place he could make a real impact, and as you can tell, we feel he has and he will continue to for a long time to come.

So… with that, please join me in welcoming Mitch to the team.

Once upon a time there was a disorganized web designer who worked from home and used Word to create his invoices. This web designer found he was spending too much of his valuable downtime wondering who owed him money and how much…it was a stress on him and a waste of energy.

Then came the day the web designer went to send an invoice to his client. In creating a new invoice (using an old invoice as the template) he forgot to rename the file and saved over the original invoice. Upon realizing what he had done he snapped saying, “I’ve had it – there has to be a better way”.

This fateful day happened in early January 2003, and the web designer spent all his spare time the rest of that month building a web application his clients could login to to view their invoices - something that looked professional and would tell him which clients had looked at their invoices so he could save time following up with people en route to collecting his money.

Today that service is called FreshBooks and in case you haven’t guessed it, that web designer was me. I’m pleased to report that FreshBooks is now publicly available and is used by over 300,000 people. We’ve built a business solving our own business problems, and the good news is, we’ve got more problems to solve.

That’s today’s FreshBooks history lesson. As an entrepreneur I find it’s good to recall your history from time to time to remember why you’ve chosen the road less traveled and to remind yourself that the way you see problems - because it’s a unique perspective - is hugely valuable. Thanks for reading.

After much eager anticipation and endless waiting, the FreshBooks time tracking widget for Mac OS X is complete!

This widget means you can track time worked for your clients with a click of a button, without logging in, and even when you’re on the road without an Internet connection — though you will need one to actually submit the time to your FreshBooks account, of course.

Download it now »

Attention Windows Users: You may wish to check out TimerSync, a 3rd party time tracking application that’s received good feedback from our customers!