A whole new look

Now you can add expenses directly from the “List of Expenses” page. New expenses are added inline to the list below, and you can edit them in place as well. We’re hoping this quicker interface will reduce the tedium of inputting expenses manually.

Vendoriffic

You’ll also notice the new “Vendor” column in the screenshot above. This means you can track exactly where you spent your cash, whether it’s the local hardware store, contractor, or commercial real estate conglomerate. Vendors are also searchable and appear in your expense reports.

At last, recurring expenses

Finally, we’ve introduced an easy means of inputting repeating expenses like rent, car leases, and hosting costs. It’s simple – when entering the first such expense, you can specify a schedule whereby that expense repeats, be it weekly, monthly, yearly, or something else. Then on the appropriate date, the expense will be re-created with the same details, right on cue.

That’s just a quick summary of some of the changes we’ve made. To see the whole thing, log into your account and have a look. As always, your feedback and comments are greatly appreciated.

We’re so proud to announce that the development studio Groovy Squared has built a delicious native iPhone app for FreshBooks, MiniBooks for FreshBooks.

Earlier this year, we published one of the first open source iPhone apps, which was an offline time tracker for FreshBooks. We hoped that others would come and better us.

Well, MiniBooks has smashed all expectations. You can create and edit clients from the phone. It integrates with the iPhone address book. You can can create multiple timers. And as you can see from the screenshot, you can credit, edit, and send invoices from your iPhone. It even allows you to enter payments as the client hands you the check!

But don’t take our word for it. Here are some of the rave reviews that keep coming in:

For mobile warriors with spotty connections, MiniBooks will seemlessly manage synchronization with your FreshBooks account regardless of your network connection.

MiniBooks is available for purchase from iTunes App Store. You can also get the free MiniBooks Lite to see if it works for you.

If you liked this, check out our other add-ons. We’re always looking for better ways to fit into your world.

New preview pages and client views

After you’ve created an invoice or estimate, you’re invited to preview your invoice from your client’s perspective. This is a pretty important view of your invoice, so we’ve classed it up. Now you’ll find a bright clean status ribbon on the top-left, which makes the current state of the invoice abundantly clear (i.e. paid). The invoice itself now sports a nice bordered shadow, and the action links above have been replaced with multi-action buttons.

But there’s more – you can now send invoices and estimates from the preview page as an administrator or staff user. This means you can review your document one final time before hitting the “Send” button.

Faster edit pages

Our new invoice and estimate pages, which we released mid-May, came at a cost. All those dynamic goodies – like the ability to re-order lines, and auto-expanding description boxes – required more processing power. Users with unusually large invoices were encountering slow-loading edit pages, sometimes having to wait 30+ seconds before they could make a single edit. Ouch. Well, we’ve been steadily releasing performance fixes since then (the first one came the very next day), and we’re proud to say that our invoice and estimate pages are now smoking fast.

To give you an idea, the graph above shows the approximate loading time of an abnormally-sized invoice (100+ lines) since we first released our re-designed edit pages. These benchmarks are from Firefox 3; Safari and Chrome load this example invoice in just one second.

Insert lines anywhere

Due to popular demand, you can now insert lines after any line on an invoice or estimate (again). Just hover over an invoice line, and a “plus” icon will appear on the left. Click the icon, and voila – a brand new line. Combined with line re-ordering, it doesn’t get much easier to draft up invoices/estimates.

Re-usable item creation makeover

Last, but not least, we’ve totally redesigned our inline item creation. Without leaving your current workflow, you can create a re-usable item directly on the invoice, complete with auto-expanding description box, configurable taxes, and so on. Plus it doesn’t look half bad either.

That’s it – short and sweet. Please take a look, and as always, your feedback is appreciated.

Mint has not only done amazing things for personal finance software, but they are hanging ten on a huge wave lifting everyone in the small business software-as-a-service (SaaS) market. FreshBooks just crossed over 700,000 users, and January was far and away our biggest month ever. New Zealand-based online accounting service, Xero, also boasted adding 1000 new paying customers in 50 days for a total of 4000. And Kashflow celebrated crossing 2,500 paying customers in the UK.

The Internet economy seems to be growing faster than the wider economy is shrinking. Facebook and MySpace and Google Apps are teaching millions of people about SaaS every month. Moreover, people are surprisingly increasingly willing to spend money online, even as spending trends are down in the wider economy. ComScore reported online commerce grew 2% year-over-year in January, rebounding very quickly from a 3% drop in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Of course, this positive trend will most help those who have already achieved market traction at the start of 2009. Just like surfing, only those who have already swam out from the beach will catch that market wave. And it should be a big one. So, if you’re surprised by the numbers today, just wait to see the killer numbers by the end of 2009.

Kowabunga!

Check out our Valentine’s Day video dedicated to all of you, shot and produced by our very own, talented Randy.

FreshBooks 2009 Valentines Day Video from FreshBooks on Vimeo.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Now users shop for software online – and increasingly they shop for web based services to meet their needs because it is easier than going to a store, and they don’t have to deal with the headaches of packaged software like installation updates, system and compatibility issues, data back up, etc.

What this means is the bottom is falling out for incumbents. Companies like Intuit achieved 87% market share by winning the shelf war. Today companies like FreshBooks go direct to consumers using the web. Perhaps it is by selling to them via advertising online, or – as in the case of FreshBooks – by benefiting from the increased efficiency of word of mouth that the web makes possible. Whichever it is, it’s not by owning the shelf.

Since change begets opportunity, you have to ask: who benefits from these new realities of distribution and who gets hurt? Clearly, it helps us little guys because the big guys can’t muscle you off the shelf in the big box stores like they used to. Who does it unsettle? Anyone who has built massive market share and counts on it to sustain their market cap. I’m thinking of Inuit and Microsoft primarily.

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.

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?”

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.