When I first started hiring developers at FreshBooks I was a little worried about how this would appeal to software developers. I worried that we’d scare off developers who would otherwise bring the kinds of technical skills we were looking for.

It has turned out to be quite the opposite.

Whenever we find a strong candidate with the technical chops we need, and we bring up the fact that they’ll be spending a few months doing nothing but talking to customers, their eyes light up and they tell us how much they wished they could have talked to their customers or end users at their LAST job. Far from treating it like an obstacle or a hoop to jump through, they look forward to it and indeed, when their time is wrapping up, many of our developers have expressed a fondness for that period of their time with FreshBooks.

The software business has gotten big and the default case nowadays is for developers to be situated far from the folks who are actually going to be using their software, and this practice has built up an image of the software developer as a remote, anti-social sort of character, but the truth is that everyone likes to see that their work is used and appreciated. And a standard practice at FreshBooks that I originally worried would make us LESS attractive to candidates turns out to do quite the opposite.

We will be posting updates to our twitter account as well as at status.freshbooks.com throughout the maintenance period. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Update: This maintenance has been completed.

This morning, the Authorize.net payment gateway went offline preventing thousands of vendors from accepting credit card payments including many FreshBooks customers.  With their website and phone system unaccessible, Authorize.net has been fielding questions with their Twitter account this morning.

For FreshBooks customers using the Authorize.net gateways to automatically bill their customers, Authorize.net transactions that failed this morning will automatically be retried tomorrow morning. You will know this has happened as the status of your Authorize.net invoices will have changed to ‘retry’.

However, if Authorize.net is not back up by tomorrow morning, your invoices will change to the ‘failed’ status and the status will become a red active link.  The ‘failed’ status link allows you to retry the payment any time in the future giving you to option to retry the transaction when Authorize.net becomes available.

Please note that although Authorize.net remains offline, all of our other payment gateways continue to function normally such as PayPal, Google Checkout, and Linkpoint.

Beers for Canada is a fund raising effort for a non-profit organization that is looking to drive government transparency by making good use of data. The US government is supporting these kinds of initiatives with Data.gov, and Toronto’s Mayor Miller announced something similar at the mesh conference this spring for the City of Toronto.

I’m a huge fan of governments publicly exposing data sets so that software developers can do neat things with the data. I think it’s going to lead to all kinds of efficiencies and useful services for businesses and the public alike.

Anyways, I just wanted to direct your attention to Beers for Canada and some of the interesting projects they are trying to advance. FreshBooks has bought a round (made a $100 donation), and I’m sure they’d appreciate your support too if you are that way inclined.

We've added more invitations to FreshBooks

A few weeks ago, we announced that FreshBooks accounts can talk to each other and that you can invite contractors to join your projects.  I think the backstory for why we did this is kind of interesting.

Since the release I’ve been on the phone with a number of business owners who are using FreshBooks to manage their invoicing network and we learned they wanted more - they want to invite their vendors and contractors to invoice them, not just invite their contractors to track time on their projects. “Why?” is this a big deal you ask? I had the same question and I put it to every entrepreneur I spoke with.

What they told me was the benefit of receiving all their invoices in one format on one platform is enormous. Before they used to get 10 invoices a month from 4 contractors in many different formats (Word, Excel, PDF, hand written…). All these formats created frustrating inconsistencies, but all their invoices in FreshBooks takes the pain away, and it helps them clearly understand their cash flow. Most mind blowing of all to me is the contractors were grateful for the recommendation.

Another thing the entrepreneurs explained was that the ability to quickly receive estimates inside their FreshBooks accounts was a big deal. Thanks to FreshBooks they they can now quickly request, organize and evaluate multiple project proposals/bids/estimates/quotes from multiple vendors. FreshBooks takes the hassle out of collecting bids, and it makes it dead simple to accept the winning proposal and get on with the work.

After learning these things we hopped to it and made it easy to request other professionals to send you invoices and estimates. We’re pleased to announce that you can now invite people to invoice you or send you estimates. Here are some screen shots that show you where you can start the invitation process from within your FreshBooks account:

Invite via received invoices and estimates

Invite from the “My Account” section

That’s all for now folks, enjoy.

Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We were able to offer updates on our progress via http://status.freshbooks.com, and should you ever encounter downtime you think might be associated with FreshBooks, we encourage you to check our status.

We’re pleased to report all systems have returned to normal. But if you are continuing to experience troubles with your FreshBooks account, please call us at 1.866.303.6061 or email us at support@freshbooks.com and let us know.

Thank you for you patience and understanding and have a great day.

As you can see, several key components of the timer have been enlarged. First, the font of the running timer has been increased making it easier to read (now you can keep an eye on your timer while you’re standing over by the water cooler ). Second, the Start/Stop button was made bigger and is now front and center making it more obvious and easier to click. The Reset button is now on its own and we hope this will prevent people from accidentally clearing out their hours (I know I’ve done this before).

Thanks to popular demand, you’ll also notice a new button was added allowing you to switch the time format from hours (e.g. 1.5 hrs) to hours:minutes:seconds (e.g. 01:30:00). Both formats increment at the same time, but keep in mind that when you log your hours the timesheet only displays in the hours format (e.g. 1.5 hrs).

I thought I’d wrap up with a little known fact: did you know you can enter time into the Hours field in the format of hours:minutes, and FreshBooks will automatically convert that into hours in decimal format? It’s a useful feature that not many people know about so I thought I’d share. This can be done on the timer and on the FreshBooks timesheets.

We hope you enjoy the shiny new timer, as always please send us your feedback by commenting below.

Disclaimer for non-Twitter freaks: read the conversations/photos from the bottom up, that’s the way conversations work on Twitter!

Serve customers

We use our @FreshBooks account to answer questions – doing support for our customers is what initially led us to use Twitter.

Establish brand voice

As you can see, we like to be playful, silly and inane here at FreshBooks.

Deepen relationships

Here’s an example of a customer who was having a rough day and we wanted here to know she’s not alone, we also sent her flowers.

Engage brand fans

We like games, and this is us playing “Eye Spy” on Twitter with some friends.

Break news

This one went out about 15 minutes we before our last release…

Parting thought

As you can see there is lots you can do with twitter – we think you’re only limited by your imagination!

Slife Web makes sure you bill for every minute with their FreshBooks integration.

If you’re one of those people who at the end of a 10 hour day has only managed to log 4 hours of work, Slife Web may just be the thing for you. Slife automatically sits there on your computer watching what you do all day long. At the end of the day, it reports exactly how many hours you were processing email, heads down coding, or researching on the web. All without you having to start and stop a watch.

I’m happy to hear that Slife plans on open sourcing the clients. I hope a plethora of extensions will be built to track all sorts of work flows.

But most of all, I’m super excited that Slife recently integrated with FreshBooks. You can now export time logged in Slife into FreshBooks. If you try it out, I’d love to hear below if you found that you were underbilling your time.

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.