FreshBooks Supper Club - Novemberish 2008

FreshBooks Supper Club Novemberish 2008

Not sure if it is cold where you are but my fingers are so cold today that there almost wasn’t an intro this month. But like a phoenix rising from its ashes the intro was reborn because we know without this intro you wouldn’t know that this month’s Supper Club is jammed packed with FreshBooks goodness delivered directly to your inbox etc etc. So cozy up with some soup and warm bread and enjoy the goings on from your friends at FreshBooks!

News and Stuff From Inside the FB Walls

Product News: You’ve Got Mail!

A little known secret about FreshBooks is that before we make many important decisions we ask ourselves the obvious question...What would Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan do? (WWTHAMRD) It may sound silly but this has saved us more than a few times. One of the last examples was when we were deciding on new features to add to FreshBooks. Our list was long but the choice was easy. So thanks to Tom and Meg starring in a little film called You’ve Got Mail, you can now receive FreshBooks invoices from other FreshBooks users right from inside your account! Even cooler is that you can also click on an item to pay it off, or convert incoming invoices to expenses that you can then bill to your own clients! We are pretty excited about this and while we never talk about what is coming in the future we have to say you will be really jazzed about the features we are coming up with that were influenced by another Tom and Meg classic, Joe Versus the Volcano.

Win Saul’s Birthday Present!

FreshBooks employee Saul Colt (that's me!) loves his parents but even he admits that they don’t give great birthday presents. Ski Goggles, velour jumper, legwarmers and cheese are all things given in years past. Saul appreciates the gesture but not always the gifts, so last month he decided not to open this year’s offering and award it (still wrapped) to a FreshBooks customer. So if you would like to win this amazing prize/surprise (who knows...it could be a gold watch) all you have to do is tell 10 people that “FreshBooks is jammed full of awesomesauce”. Once you have done that drop an email to Saul by December 5th and one lucky winner will get to celebrate Saul’s birthday in a special way. Remember, there is no real way we can prove that you told 10 people so we are going to use the honour system here...but hey...we love and trust you so we know you won’t cheat!

More Product Goodies

We hope you realize by now that we like to be helpful but since we can’t come to your office and lend a hand we did the next best thing. We made FreshBooks more handy by integrating with three (yes I said three) pretty cool services that complement FreshBooks pretty well!

Bootstrap Brings Quarterly Tax Estimates to FreshBooks
Bootstrap, a free online bookkeeping tool, helps U.S. small businesses that file Schedule Cs prepare quarterly tax estimates and keep track of their profitability over the year. This new integration allows you to import your FreshBooks invoices and payments into your Bootstrap account. More info.

Skydeck Helps You Bill for Phone Time
Now, you can quickly and easily convert cell phone calls into time tracking entries in FreshBooks. Our new Skydeck to FreshBooks importer matches up your clients’ phone numbers in FreshBooks to cell phone calls logged in Skydeck. It’s only a couple clicks to import them into FreshBooks. From there, they are ready to be invoiced to your clients. More info.

TSheets Now Invoices with FreshBooks
TSheets is a time tracking service built for the mobile workforce and now offers the ability to invoice their time tracked through FreshBooks. This integration provides a lot of flexibility for 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. More info.

TSheets is offering FreshBooks users a $20 off discount when they sign up with the coupon code FB2008. Offer is valid until April 1, 2009.

Lessons Learned from The Godfather of Soul, James Brown

When James Brown passed away there were as many as 30 kids who came out and claimed to be the son of the Godfather of Soul. We don’t remember what the resolution was because when we think of JB we think of this, but something that did stick with us was how there are people out there that you may have never met that are depending on you...or in JB’s case “really depending on you” to teach you and be a positive part of their life. So with that in mind we wanted to share something that really impressed us. FreshBooks Customer (and friend) Adam Metz recently released an e-book on Social Media Strategies and we thought it was great and figured you guys may get something out of reading it.

Quick Hits

--> Did you know that this is the one year anniversary of this here newsletter (if you can really call it a newsletter) Yep #12! Big thanks go to everyone who reads it before hitting delete and I am fine with only thanking the people who read this because the folks don’t read it to the end will never know they were excluded (but we still love them anyway).

--> FreshBooks customer (and friend) BLANKSPACES, a super amazing co-working space in Los Angeles is hosting FREELANCER FRIDAYS...a monthly happy hour for freelancers of all types for networking and meeting new people in a casual and fun environment. Free food and booze is provided by BLANKSPACES. The next one is on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 (and every third Thursday thereafter) and you can check out their website for more information.

--> We know this was in last month’s Supper Club but occasional FreshBooks’ Employee of the month, Saul Colt will be speaking at a workshop with Tony Hsieh from Zappos as well as some folks from Wired, Get Satisfaction on the topic of listening to your customers. If you are free on December 9th and are in NYC please check this out, as he says there may be a surprise planned :)

--> ...and finally, we all had some fun in the office for FreshBooks Dress Up Day but we forgot to shoot any video. We did find a video that is pretty close to what it was like...enjoy!

Dress Up Day at FreshBooks!

If you know anything about us here at FreshBooks it is that we like to inject a little fun on top of our responsibility and promise to bring you the best Online Invoicing service in the World. We do a bunch of things to lighten up things around here and the most recent thing we did was have a dress up day. Everyone arrived at work in a costume and hilarity ensured so much that we think we may make this an annual event and try to encourage others to join in on the fun too. So mark your calendar, October 31st 2009 is now going to officially be FreshBooks Dress Up day. Think of it as “Take Your Kids to Work Day” but more fun and inclusive.