I’ve been a big fan of Freshbooks and have used the invoicing system and time tracking tool very easy to use. It’s built in tools to help you collect overdue invoices is wonderful. What I didn’t like about it is it limited th number of clients I could have (the more clients I had, the more I would have to pay).
I hated that the third party app that I used to track time on my desktop quit working.
I hated that when I paid them, my money had to go through a conversation and as the US economoy is crap, I always got the short end of the stick.
It’s $7 less a month for their smallest account, and it has UNLIMITED Clients, UNLIMITED Projects, and UNLIMITED invoicing. They have all the basic tools you need, and the ability to tie in with a TON of third party apps. You can track time on your iPhone, Droid, iPad, etc. It does all the “nudging” and collections that Freshbooks did, AND it has a retainer tool (very cool).
I was playing with the system and (for lack of a better phrase) tried to make it do something stupid. The system wouldn’t let me. However, I didn’t know what I was doing was being “silly.” I sent an email to their support and got a very quick response. That made my decision to move my billing to their system a “no brainer.”
I mentioned this service a few episodes back, and after using a system that tracked my time, and then another system to do billing, I got tired of the hassle. I was always behind on my billing as it took too much time.
I now can login to my website, make a few clicks and generate and invoice for a client that automatically checks the times that have not been billed, and puts them into the invoice for this customer. It takes less than a minute. Then I email to my customer. They go to my website, login, and pay my invoice. It them to paypal, they pay the invoice. It updates freshbooks, and sends me an email to alert me I’ve been received a payment. I’m not involved at all.
If my customer does not pay the bill in a time that I set up, it emails them and lets them know they are late. I can set so many billing options. I can set up reoccurring payments, I can bill by the hour, by the task, by the project, and more. IT’s very flexible, and yet not so robust that it creates a giant learning curve.
I have a client of mine that is site impaired. He said it was “easy peasy.” So that was a nice bonus as well. My billing went from taking an hour or so to minutes. This pays for the monthly fee and then some. I love this system. There is even a free version if you want to kick the tires. Watch the video to see behind the scenes of Freshbooks.
Now that your site is up, the next question seems to be “how do I get more traffic?” This usually leads to a discussion about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Creating my Weekly Web Tools podcast, I often ran across many free tools for SEO at the Seo Book website. There is plenty of free information that they used to sell their book. ($79)
Now the book has grown into a series of tutorials to get you “in the know” quickly, as well as a community that will trade secrets. The cost is $100 a month.
This is a cool tool that you can try for free. If you have more than three clients its $14 a month and it can really cut down on the time to invoice. I’m playing with it write now (I’ve been working on this podcast for .925 (and I’m not done).
Form Spring – Get Results via RSS check it out at formpring.com you can use it for free, but if you need to tie in e-commerce its $19 a month. I liked this as it allows the form to do some ma thematic calculations behind the scenes.
Why Customer Product Reviews Boost Online Sales an article from http://www.wilsonweb.com/ He points out some tools to handle customer reviews. These include:
I’m stll loving this Carbonite service. It’s so stinkin easy and I’ve got thousands of files backed up. You can have unlimitted files backed up (as long as they are off a hard drive, and not a USB).
