FreshBooks Supper Club

FreshBooks Supper Club

Welcome the fifth meeting of the FreshBooks Supper Club. I think I am going to stop numbering these things but I wanted to stick with it for this one so I could make a bunch of jokes at the expense of the TV show “Party of Five” but then I remembered that Party of Five was pretty depressing and that is not what the FreshBooks Supper Club is all about!

For those new to the Supper Club, here is how it works, once a month the “FSC” will be delivered directly to your inbox and will be jam packed with profiles of the beautiful and talented people who use FreshBooks (Fresh Faces), Contests, FreshBooks Tips and Tricks, and my favourite, news and stuff from inside the FB walls. Among other things this section will outline what events and cities we will be visiting to spread the good word of FreshBooks.

News and Stuff from inside the FB walls

Starting off the Supper Club with a story on how we got some cool press for a customer is becoming a little cliché to some but this is one of our favourite things around here! Since we last spoke (way back in the FreshBooks Supper Club #4 –ed) we were featured in the LA Times! Ok we weren’t the ones featured but rather FreshBooks user Lindsay Spiller who is an Entertainment Lawyer and happy FreshBooks fan. We are still jazzed about being mentioned in the Times so thank you Lindsay! As always if you want to be added to our list of “media darlings” please drop me a note with your company name, location and anything cool or different about you and why you love FreshBooks!

Sure you know we are always trying to get our beautiful FreshBooks users into the media but did you know that we are also trying to get you guys more work! It’s true! We recently added what we are calling (for now at least) the “Gig/Project” board and this is going to be a place you can post projects you need someone to help you with and connect with other people you already have stuff in common with!

Anyone notice anything different about their login page? Yep, a few weeks ago we added a little more punch to the login pages by adding your branded colors and a logo. Why did we do this? Because we believe the little things do make a difference. =)

OK, I admit this may come off as shameless promotion for ourselves but we feel comfortable with you guys so we don’t mind asking. If you love FreshBooks even half as much as we love and appreciate all of you, then you might like to refer us to friends and associates.

We would love this and want to help any way we can so we had a big pile of FreshBooks Gift Cards made up for you to pass along to others. The really cool part of the cards is that they are registered to you so if your friend does use it they get one month free and as a thank you from us, you will get two months free. If you would like a few cards please drop me an email and I will get them out to you minutes after I receive your email...heck I will even walk them to the mail box a few times a day if the demand is there!

Wanna Work here? FreshBooks is in the market for a couple of crack web developers, and if you know anyone who fits that bill (and we hire them), 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 and 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” or check out our Roadburn RV trip. Oh and we’re also looking to hire a seasoned agile web development manager. If you help us fill that role, same bounty applies.

I saved this for last since I am going to fess up to posting something that wasn’t correct in last month’s Supper Club and like corrections in newspapers I figured I would make this hard to find as well...just kidding...well about the hard to find part that is. Last month I was screaming from the rooftops about our new Mac OS X time tracking widget and said there was a Yahoo (PC) version coming soon. Well I misspoke so for all you PC users (of which I am one) I want to point you in the direction of TimerSync. This PC based widget was made by a FreshBooks user and we think it is a great add on so please check it out!

Fresh Faces: Michael Dowling

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

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.