Nick,

I'm not sure whether it will comfort you to know this or not, but these are all things we are working on.  First step is the time sheet and I think it is going to knock your socks off...you can learn more about it here:

http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2006/06/ … wn-cookie/
http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2006/06/ … rks-alone/

From there, I can't comment other than to say I think you must have put some bugs in our office...

Great feedback/requests.  Thanks for posting.

I strongly recommend subscribing to our blog so you can stay up to date with what we are building.  You can subscribe here:

If you don't know about subscribing to blogs, you might want to give this a read:

http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2006/06/23/182/

Cool.  Estimates is something we toss around frequently over here and we will defintely keep them in mind...this is great feedback by the way. 

Daniel has some useful work arounds estimates that I will try to get him to post when he has a moment.  Thanks again.

I use Quicken 2006 to track my expenses - both personal and business.

It would be great if I could use FB to do this so that everything is in one place only.

The other benefits of using Quicken are the following:
1. It automatically downloads (on a set interval), my bank statements (checking, savings and credit card)

2. I can then manually go in (once a week is how I do it) and assign expenses to the correct categories.

3. At the end of the year, when doing my tax return, I use QuickTax Corporate and it automatically imports summary totals from Quicken.

These features are important to me and if FB offers this, I would stop using Quicken immediately.

Now get cracking FB team and make us use FB to manage our businesses completely!

I've brought up the competitor billingorchard.com before not to persuad users to move but to spur some innovation on freshbooks part soas not to lose customers.  BillingOrchard has a great feature that freshbooks needs to address.  They allow you to add time and add services, add fees, etc to a client but not invoice them.  So for instance if you add $100 worth of items toa  client they can log in and see they will owe $100 and what it is for without actually having an invoice.  They could then pay down their acquired balance when they wanted and then you could invoice for individual items or whole balance at a certain time each month etc.  The items, fees, time etc that you add can also be hidden from the user until you invoice if you want. 

FreshBooks needs to realize that estimates or charges will sometimes need to be added even though you don't want to bill the customer yet.

Well I could make a long post about what is better about Freshbooks I guess because I used to use BO, but I no longer do because it is not as good.  I only point out things that I did like to help Freshbooks be even better so no one would ever have a reason to use anything else.  If there are features that I think were good on competing services but noone in this community feels that way then it really doesn't matter, I'm just sharing my viewpoint.  I have several online businesses and I LOVE to hear what other people think of cempetitors becsue it makes me see sometimes that I'm missing the baot on a few features or how I do business and I adapt and change for the better.

There's only one thing to add. FreshBooks is doing a great job at support and communication, there are definitely things to look forward to.

I am going to disagree with this idea.

Freshbooks was designed to do one thing:  send invoices.  It is not a replacement for your accounting software nor was it intended to do so.  If you look at the homepage it states, in giant letters:  The Fastest Way to Invoice Your Clients.

Adding all these additional features is just going to make Freshbooks more awkward and cumbersome.  The majority of users do not want Freshbooks to be a full blown accounting package.

I have been requesting this for the longest time.  Fresh Books people are probably sick of me constantly sending requests lol.  Any ways reporting is a critical part of any business.  More critical than mailing invoices.  Any system that can give me good reports will make my life much easier when the time comes to pay Uncle Sam.  Right now reports are ok, but there is no way for me to track my Mileage, purchases, Non Taxable sales etc.  I'd love to be able to track all that and then if I want associate those expenses and mileage to jobs and also be able to generate profitability report.  Also be able to generat Profit and Loss statements.  I think before you guys do any thing else concentrate on reporting modules.

Steven from Edgewood Hosting wanted me to post this on his behalf:

Steven wrote:

I'd like to be able to create "estimates" (sometimes known as "quotes" in some industries) within Freshbooks. The interface could (should?) look identical to the invoice entry screen except:

(1) when the link is sent to the customer it clearly says in the email that this is just an estimate and not to be alarmed, they still need to approve the work/services/products listed

(2) the "print view" of the estimate says "ESTIMATE" on it instead of "INVOICE" and there is space at the bottom to put the terms and conditions of the estimate (boilerplate text).

(3) Upon receiving the magic URL link in email, the customer can review the estimate and click on one of three choices:

   (3)(a)  Click on "ACCEPT/APPROVE" and it gets marked as an approved
            invoice. Perhaps even ask the customer to type in their full name
            and telephone number as a quasi-electronic "signature" of approval.

   (3)(b)  Click on "DECLINE" and it gets marked as such.

   (3)(c)  Click on "SUGGEST CHANGE" and the customer has a small text
            box to suggest changes on the estimate. An example would be "I
            like the pricing for apples and oranges but can you do better than
            $3 on the bananas? Send me a new quote please."

If approved, the estimate gets placed into a queue of "approved estimates" for the Freshbooks admin. Now I can browse through the approved estimates, do whatever needs to happen in the estimate (for my industry, it's activating their web hosting account), and then with one click convert the estimate into an invoice (just bringing over all the line items into the "new invoice" screen). From there, I can adjust the line items if necessary but most of the fields have been entered for me so there's little re-typing. One more click and the real official invoice is on its way to them.

Fresh Mike wrote:

Daniel has some useful work arounds estimates that I will try to get him to post when he has a moment.  Thanks again.

Are these work arounds anywhere?  I was going to officially start using freshbooks to send a quote today but I quickly realized that is not part of the system right now.

When FreshBooks first started it was a great service they actually listened to people and added some cool features like support ticketing system and a couple of other things.  But then same thing happened to Fresh Books what happens to most companies when they get big, they get greedy or whatever else you want to call them, they don't listen to any input and do what they want to do.  They just want to include features that will earn them more money such as ground mail and some other project management stuff etc. 
I have been requesting and I'm sure other people are for the last 2 years for some features that are fairly simple and will benefit all of us however it seems like Fresh Books staff does not want to listen any more so they just recommend work around.  Well I'm sorry I am not interested in work around'. I'm willing to pay a little extra but I want the functionality and features.  Such as:

1- Expenses and estimates.
2- Running Profit and loss Reports.
3- Be able to run report on how much discount I have given (think about it I give discount and can't run report how much discount I have given in total that is messed up).

Is that to much to ask guys?

Usits: I understand your frustration.  I think Ryan did an impeccable job of addressing your concerns so I'll try not to repeat things.

Thanks for coming to our defence Vortex - I could not have said it better myself.

That said, I want you to know that at every step of the way we ask ourselves, "what is best for the community of people who use this product?"  It's never going to be an easy question to answer because everyone has unique needs, so we try to focus on things that will address the needs of the greatest number of people while keeping our service as simple as possible.  All I can tell you is that we are still only seven people and that we will continue to do our best to ensure FreshBooks continues to serve the greatest number of people with the greatest amount of value and the least amount of complexity.