Fresh? We hope so!

Many of our clients have Intelligenta services on a monthly basis. This is a traditional approach that IT service providers take and one that can get out of hand easily. The usual monthly question, ‘Why hasn’t Joe Bloggs Inc paid yet’ resulted in the usual discovery that Joe Bloggs Inc hadn’t received their invoice. Clients are funny like that, not paying invoices they haven’t received.

I spent 5 months in Brisbane last year on the approach to my wedding and then several months after waiting for a visa so my wife and I could return home. During this time in between my reduced input to client work I thought best to discover a new way for Intelligenta to manage billing. Not an easy task as it seems as there are literally hundreds of different applications all of which are offer a different level of features with licenses that range from free to several ££££. Some of these applications were great but overly complicated, some fell short and others made my laptop break. Overall it wasn’t a very satisfying venture.

Last month I read a great post from the Business Opportunites Weblog recommending some tools for startups. One of these tools happened to be Freshbooks a leading provider of online invoicing. So finally at the beginning of this week after waiting eagerly for a month I decided it was time to give Freshbooks a go.

Easy to sign up, a simple interface that is fully brandable, this is definitely a good start indeed. After quickly working my way around the interface reviewing the features and settings it didn’t take me long to get that this might fit our requirements perfectly. I also suspect that Freshbooks is built on Rails which gives it an extra gold star.

You can create and store clients, products or services for multiple use (write once, read many) and once these are setup you can begin invoicing. As the majority of our clients are monthly we will make good use of the recurring invoices feature. The whole process from start to finish was quick, easy and not in the least bit painful (goodbye mailmerge).

Even though we have only been using Freshbooks for a few days now we can already see the huge benefits of the estimate feature too. This allows us to either create and track a new quote for a client or to simply store ad-hoc products and services ready for easy invoice generation at the beginning of the month (goodbye spreasheets).

Early days I know but based on our initial impression we didn’t hesitate to pay for a subscription and with all monthly billing setup to automatically generate invoices at the beginning of the month our hopes are high. In July we may even set them to send automatically too and just wait until we start using the timesheet feature.

Signup and try and Freshbooks today we have and I’m excited to see what happens on the 1st June.