Watch how you can now generate FreshBooks invoices in TSheets, a time tracking tool built for the mobile workforce.

Today we’re happy to announce that TSheets, a time tracking service built for the mobile workforce, has made it easy to generate FreshBooks invoices from inside their application.

FreshBooks has many customers that work in the field, such as those in the building and construction trades. We’re always looking for ways to better fit their work flow. We think many of our customers will find TSheets beneficial.

TSheets provides a lot of flexibility when managing agents constantly on the move. Using TSheets, your workforce can clock in/out with SMS text messages from any cellphone. More advanced users can use iPhone, Android, or mobile web time tracking interfaces. They also have cool voice time tracking through an integration with Jott.

TSheets also has a very flexible system for organizing tracked time. With their hierarchical job code system, you can do more than track projects and tasks. You can organize your time and your team any way you want.

While TSheets does work well for sole agents, they really help larger companies with a team of field agents. They provide customizable time reports to make it easy to keep track of what’s going on out in the field. The reports even roll up into QuickBooks ready for payroll.

Overall, pretty sweet. Our thanks to TSheets for making this happen.

Watch the screencast to see how it works.

At FreshBooks, customer service and support are included for free. To us people are people - we don’t treat them differently if they pay us a monthly fee or not. Traditionally, software providers have charged extra for support and we think this is crap. Support is as valuable to us as it is to the people who reach out when they need help.

We never thought too much about our free service “policy” when we started. We just figured if someone needed help they should get it. Our customers, let’s call them the Fortune 50 million, are entrepreneurs. They are busy and they don’t want to spend their time meddling with their billing service. If a person calls, it’s probably our fault for not designing FreshBooks to be easy enough to use, so they deserve support.

For all the bean counters who see support as a cost center, think again. Telephone calls and email and the forums threads are research tools. Every person you connect with helps inform decisions about what’s working and what’s not, and gives you ideas about what to do next. In all seriousness, I would pay for this service.

So when people ask, “how can you afford to support free users?” I ask, “how can you afford not to?”

I woke up this morning and wandered over to 37signals‘ most inspiring blog, Signal vs. Noise, to read Sarah Hatter pointedly asking How can anyone ever ask us why we don’t offer phone support?

At FreshBooks, we have a commitment that if you call us any time at 1-866-303-6061 from 9am to 6pm EDT Monday to Friday, one of us at the office will answer. I’d tell Sarah we don’t just do this because we’re friendly Canadians, but because it makes all the difference.

Sarah makes the fair point that as a civilization, Western companies have repeatedly stabbed a knife in the faces of their customers in the past twenty years. Try calling your local telco or bank to fix a billing issue, and you’ll likely to be on hold for 45 minutes. In this day and age, she accurately argues, no one expects to get phone support because other companies suck at it.

In a perfect world, calling a business for help would be quick, painless, productive, and human. But it’s not and it’s not going to be. That old time ideal of calling the local retailer or company and talking with someone after two rings was demolished by the call centers and overseas help desks that sprung up in the information age.

Here, I’d turn her argument around, and answer the question. The whole advantage of a small company is that they are more accessible. Indeed, she answers her own question why people want phone support.

Now, I know people want to pick up a phone and talk to a live human being. We all want assurance that our money is being spent on something maintained by human beings who speak our language and hopefully live in our same country. I get that instinct, because I share it at times.

Personally, I have to believe smart people wouldn’t trust their mission critical business to a company whose throat you can’t choke. At FreshBooks, many of our calls are people kicking the tires before they buy just to make sure we’re alive and responsive.

I’ll tell you the secret of why we answer the phone. Sarah is completely right: people don’t expect it. When we answer the phone right away, we have proved we’re a different kind of company. We demonstrate we put a priority on customer service.

Our motto here is Execute on Extraordinary Experiences Everyday. As Sarah points out, good customer service is in fact extraordinary in the sense that it’s abnormal. That’s sad because everybody wants it.

Therefore, if you want to truly brighten the day of a customer that wants to phone, answer the phone. It’s good for business! When a customer hits a wall, we can free their minds immediately by being a real human being that takes ownership of the problem and fights on their behalf. Those customers become your most loyal advocates.

So, why answer the phone? Because you can. Because it gives you a chance to turn a frustrated customer into your greatest customer evangelist. Because you’ll hear great stories from happy customers every day. And because no one expects it, and that makes you look extraordinary.

Still not convinced? Call me!

My name is Jeffrey Nichols, and I’m an independent SEO/SEM developer based in Atlanta, Georgia.

“FreshBooks is one of the most well programmed, nicest looking web-based applications I’ve ever used.”

I have a client that requires me to bill my hours with specific job codes for each project that I work on. I totally understand this because they must then bill this time back to their clients. It makes sense. But it’s a rather time consuming task. I was trying to keep track of all this using a spreadsheet in Google Docs but it was too overwhelming. So I set out to find something better.

I needed something that was Web-based so I could access it anywhere. I wanted something with a Web 2.0 look and feel, because I’m spoiled and I knew I could find it. I wanted something that would allow me to track the job codes that this client needed me to use. And finally, I needed something that could generate PDF invoices that I could send to the client in order to continue the same procedure we already had in place.

Enter FreshBooks. FreshBooks is one of the most well programmed, nicest looking web-based applications I’ve ever used. It’s super fast, super clean and you can tell that the people who wrote it actually use it. There are things that happen when you’re using it that make you say out loud “that’s what I was getting ready to look for” and FreshBooks has already taken you there.

If you bill your clients by the hour and managing it in a spreadsheet has gotten out of control, give this a try. You’ll love it, I promise.

My name is Ariel Bernard, and I’m president of DesignByAriel, Inc.. We rely on FreshBooks to keep our business running, our employees organized, and our clients smiling.

“We found FreshBooks in mid-2006 and have been in love ever since.”

Before FreshBooks, we were using four different Web- and desktop-based tools to achieve the same results. Our clients were confused, billing was time-consuming, and projects were slow to start. The bottom line was our clients wanted a solution that was easy and efficient.

Our primary requirement for selecting a new accounting and invoicing solution was something Web-based. It was the 21st century and so few of the options were in Web-based billing. We’re a Web company, with employees and contractors all over the United States. We needed a Web solution for billing that worked.

We found FreshBooks in mid-2006 and have been in love ever since. Our clients find it easy, and our staff enjoy the efficiency of the time tracking and expense recording.

If we had to choose one feature that is truly groundbreaking, it would have to be one-click invoice mailing. We spent so much time in the past preparing monthly invoicing. Now we can send out 50 invoices in five minutes. Beat that, QuickBooks!

“There is nothing like getting to your desk on Monday to see that more than half of the invoices sent have been paid over the weekend by credit card.”

Payment is second on our favorites list. We find over 80% of our clients prefer to pay with a credit card. Our clients like to handle issues at their leisure; with FreshBooks, they can settle their entire account balance at 4am on a Lufthansa flight using their MasterCard. There is nothing like getting to your desk at 8am on Monday to see that more than half of the invoices sent have been paid over the weekend by credit card.

FreshBooks is much more than billing, we also drive our entire support ticket system through the same service. There are many Web-based support ticket systems out there, but if you want your clients to actually use the system you put in place, we’ve found that a consolidated service is the only way to go. In our opinion, FreshBooks is the best all-in-one solution available.

Since 2003, we’ve been developing innovative websites, interactive web-applications, forward-thinking branding solutions, and much more. With FreshBooks as part of our arsenal, we’re billing, support, and client-management gurus, too.

Littlelines is a small, friendly development team consisting of clean design and top notch coding.

Well okay, that’s the text from our homepage. Behind the scenes, we’re two brothers who have teamed up to create awesome websites. One is a designer — the other is a developer. We think it’s a good match.

Who are you?

Matt Sears is a software developer with over eight years of experience in developing applications for the Web. Prior to Littlelines, Matt was Technical Lead at LexisNexis, a global online search engine for legal and business documents. There he led large and small teams on enterprise application development projects.

Josh Sears entered the professional world as a Graphic Designer for Scott Hull Associates, the country’s top artist agency. There he honed his skills for a half decade until finally he was considered an equal of the nation’s top artists and designers.

Josh’s work has been celebrated in such publications as HOW Magazine, Print, 3X3, and honoured by associations such as American Illustrators and Graphic Design USA.

What do you do?

Simply put, we make clean, user-friendly websites.

What was business like before FreshBooks?

Honestly? We didn’t have a business before FreshBooks. It was one of our first choices when we started the company due to the fact that we wanted a simple, intuitive process of invoicing our clients.

What is business like with FreshBooks?

Things are going great. The system is easy and pain-free. Payments have arrived smoothly and everyone seems happy. We couldn’t be happier.

My name is Michael Dowling, and I’m a co-founder and developer of WeGoAll, the fraternity and sorority website design specialists.

“FreshBooks has helped WeGoAll to automate our entire client billing process.”

We’ve done the Excel thing. We looked into trying to use a built-in recurring billing feature in different payment gateways. We also thought about devoting valuable time and effort to creating our own in-house invoicing system. None of that was flexible, professional, nor cost-effective enough for our company. Then we found FreshBooks.

FreshBooks has helped WeGoAll to automate our entire client billing process. We have several different recurring billing schedules including yearly, monthly, and quarterly. With FreshBooks’ recurring profiles, we finally have an invoicing system that makes managing our accounts feasible.

To us, the most beneficial part of FreshBooks is the ability to send out snail-mail invoices.

“With the click of a button, FreshBooks can send out invoices to the client’s mailing address, including a return envelope to make paying their bill more convenient.”

Because our clients are primarily fraternities and sororities, our contact information for these organizations is always changing. The one thing that doesn’t usually change is the chapter’s mailing address. With the click of a button, FreshBooks can send out invoices to the client’s mailing address, including a return envelope to make paying their bill more convenient.

FreshBooks is a great invoicing system, and we recommend it for any business that wants to look professional and get paid on-time.

I have enough conflict in my life.

“I’ll be converting all my current client invoicing to FreshBooks and starting new clients there. FreshBooks, you rock.”

As a professional workplace mediator, executive conflict coach and conflict resolution blogger, I willingly walk into other people’s conflicts. A Red Cross blood-drawing nurse once slapped her hand on my forehead to take my temperature when she heard that.

In my line of work, I have to stay calm and centred, keep my approaches simple and straightforward, and make communication with clients clear and easy. And I want my business systems to do the same for me.

Yet when I switched to a Mac in 2006, I wasn’t feeling very relaxed about how much more complicated my client invoicing system got. QuickBooks for Mac didn’t meet my simple, straightforward standards and neither did any of the other options I sampled. None quite managed the kind of invoicing and time-tracking solution I hoped was out there somewhere.

FreshBooks came to my rescue and I’m such a fan I included it in my top 10 for 2008 list on the blog I write for my fellow mediators. Some mediators aren’t very comfortable with technology for business, yet I can comfortably recommend FreshBooks even to them because I know they won’t be overwhelmed by learning or using it.

When I first visited FreshBooks’ site and read the claim about getting paid faster, I have to admit I rolled my eyes at the apparent hyperbole. A week later I stopped the eye-rolling permanently when a chronically late-paying client had a cheque on my desk just a few days after my first FreshBooks invoice went to them via e-mail.

I’ll be converting all my current client invoicing to FreshBooks and starting new clients there. FreshBooks, you rock.

My name is Joe Scarpa and I’m the founder and “chief healer” at Mac House Calls, an Apple-certified computer services company.

“We are able to accept credit cards on-site via FreshBooks’ integration with Authorize.Net.”

About two years ago I made my first attempt at automating our invoicing process. I devised a system that ran on Palm OS based on a package from an upstate software company.

Overall it was pretty slick; our consultants used the software on their Palm Treo handhelds to create invoices and time slips, complete with job notes. Through a custom interface, the information from the Treos was imported into our accounting system, MYOB. It was really easy to create invoices on a Treo; just a few clicks did the trick.

This was a giant step forward from our previous system (paper with carbon copies, hand-entered into the accounting system), but it still had numerous shortcomings:

• It was very difficult to enter job notes. Typing on the Treo keyboard was cumbersome, and as a result we found our consultants often waited until the end of the day to do this, rather than at the time the work was complete.
• We had no integrated way of handling credit card payments. We mostly ended up calling these in by phone.
• The Palm-based system didn’t allow us to leave the customer a receipt at the time services were rendered. Instead, receipts were e-mailed out from our accounting system after having been imported.

“The FreshBooks interface is fast and intuitive.”

These shortcomings rendered this method more labour-intensive and error-prone than we wanted, so right around the time we were ready to replace the Treos with iPhones, I started looking for another solution.

Thanks to FreshBooks, here’s our new and improved process:

1. A customer calls for an appointment. If the customer is new, he’s added to MYOB; a drag-and-drop interface copies him to Address Book, and into FreshBooks via its API.
2. The consultant finishes the work and creates an entry on-site in FreshBooks. We are able to accept any kind of payment, including credit cards via FreshBooks’ integration with Authorize.Net. The customer receives a printed invoice on the spot, and an e-mail with a link to the invoice online.
3. Via the FreshBooks API, each FreshBooks invoice created during the day is imported into MYOB.

That’s it! This system has really worked out for us.

We’re pleased with how the team at FreshBooks worked with us to address any issues that came up while working through things. Our Web-based system is more reliable and less error-prone than our previous system. The FreshBooks interface is fast and intuitive, and its API uses standard XML, so it was easy to understand and easy to work with, using both C and AppleScript.

Our customers are impressed with our streamlined processes, and we’re pleased with the bottom-line benefits.

My name is Jennifer Dugan, and I own and operate Dugan’s Travels. We help people who want to be home-based travel agents get into the business, by offering training and a low-cost program; we currently have over 650 agents working across the United States and Canada.

“FreshBooks has helped us make sure we’re getting paid on time.”

Before FreshBooks, I had to manually ensure everyone was paying their monthly fees, shipping and other costs each month.

Now with FreshBooks it’s easy to see who is paying their accounts and who is checking their invoices on a regular basis. It has helped us make sure we’re getting paid on time, and if not, we know who owes the agency money.

It’s been a huge time saver.