FreshBooks Blog

I think my biggest "trial and error" experience that I can share with you is to find companies that are the best at what they do. Yes, you can find companies that do everything from time tracking to bookkeeping to CRM to project management to invoicing to payroll but I found personally that you create the issue of "yes, I have everything covered but not one function performs exactly the way I want/need it to."

The best solution is to find the best time tracking tool - I use TSheets - http://www.tsheets.com - (which may solve your time tracking needs as well as show you a visual of your real-time clock in/out of your team showing you who is working, and on what, and for how long, and with detailed notes for future reference) - then integrate that with the best invoicing company - I use FreshBooks - http://www.freshbooks.com -(yes, they also have a time tracking app but I believe their focus and strength in their product is in their invoicing solution).

This way, what you set up provides you the functionality and custom options that you have outlined as your basic needs above - better communication, better focus, more accurate billing and forecasting.... overall a better experience as a first time small business owner.

Good luck!

- http://www.diigo.com - I was never able to use any online bookmarking service for the last 10-15 years. Diigo got online bookmarking right. I would frantically pay someone to re-build diigo for me if it ever went away. I can't process, organize or navigate the internet without it.

The best feature is it's highlighting. We don't save bookmarks in our minds, but specific sentences or paragraphs. Diigo lets us highlight those and saves them right into my Diigo account/stream. I can then simply search diigo not only by keyword or bookmark, but the phrases that stuck out to me in the first place to make me want to bookmark it.

The second best feature is being able to publish the links to multiple groups so effortlessly.

- http://www.fogbugz.com (hosted) - keeps my consulting and product dev flow going.

- http://www.freshbooks.com - Trivializes the slippery slope of managing billable hours not only for you but for sub-contractors.

- http://www.bitbucket.org - Free, unlimited private repositories. Beneficial to someone like me who has a lot of small projects. I hope Github gets this soon.

Brennan Dunn's stuff is great, and I know freelancers who have been very successful in part thanks to him. I'd recommend starting small if buying products though - he had a $50 book version of Double Your Freelancing that was worth it, but at one time he also had a $2000 online course version which probably isn't the right choice for everyone.

Freshbooks have a fantastic free PDF called Breaking The Time Barrier that is about charging for value, not for your time. It's worth reading even if you don't use Freshbooks (I use Harvest instead). The PDF was actually recommended to me by a client, who I think was giving me a hint that I was charging unsustainably low prices.

https://www.freshbooks.com/blog/breakingthetimebarrier

The secret is specialization.

One beginner mistake I did was positioning myself as a generalist. I reluctantly started to accept the advice of positioning myself as a specialist a couple years ago and now I want to go back in time and punch the former me in the face. It really works: it is easier to find work and I get better clients.

Last year was my best income ever despite the crisis in Brazil.

Reading list:

1) Breaking the Time Barrier (free ebook)
https://www.freshbooks.com/ebooks/breaking-the-time-barrier

2) The Single Founder Handbook (not free but worth it)
http://www.singlefounderhandbook.com/

3) The Win Without Pitching Manifesto (read for free online)
http://www.winwithoutpitching.com/the-manifesto/

What David seems to forget is the following:

1) Free customers DO PAY for Chargify, just not to them directly. It cost us several days of development time + testing to integrate with them.

2) You lost trust because you weren't fair. Change the prices and grandfather existing users. If the free customers fail, you will not need to support them for that long.

Your pricing policy is = "you pay X/mo. until we raise it"

This post reaffirms my choice to leave Chargify and investigate the alternatives: http://recurly.com http://spreedly.com, http://cheddargetter.com & http://FreshBooks.com

For the record, I understand why they are raising prices, I cannot understand how anyone could trust them again.

If you want another perspective on this, we have to answer these kinds of questions a trillion times a week at FreshBooks. We're posting a guide to help people get through it.

The most salient post is Part II, which helps people choose their gateways.

http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2010/04/30/part-2-how-do-payment-gateways-work-and-how-to-choose-one/

Speaking as someone who frequently has to call into the payment gateways' customer support on behalf of our customers who have hit a brick wall, personally, I like to keep life easy. I recommend PayPal Standard if you're doing less than $2000-$5000 a month in transactions, and then Authorize.net or PayPal Payflow Pro.