Three weeks ago, we asked you to steal FreshBooks for a good cause. Along with our partners from The Small Business Web and AppSumo, we announced a charity drive to raise money for the National Wildlife Federation’s Gulf Oil Spill Restoration Fund. Through AppSumo, we sold $489 of small business software subscriptions for only $55 and donated half of each sale to the cleanup fund.

The final tally is in…

We raised $6792.50! That is incredibly awesome. Thank you everyone for either purchasing this great deal or helping spread the word!

If you’re interested in helping more, you can still donate directly to the National Wildlife Fund.

Everyday we’re excited to see all the sharing and referring of FreshBooks generated by you, our customers and fans.  Whether it’s done online or face-to-face, it’s been the mainstay of what gets us out of bed and into FreshBooks HQ every morning.

So to all of you that have been referring us, and all of you that are thinking about it, things just got a whole lot easier and interactive.

You can now Email, Tweet or Facebook your thoughts on FreshBooks to your friends, family, contacts, and even random strangers.   If you know they could benefit from FreshBooks, you have lots of ways to get them to try it.

To access and read more about the FreshBooks referral program, login into your account, and from the “Home” tab, go to “Refer FreshBooks.”

It gets even better; everything is tracked via a unique tracking link for your account. You’ll get a monthly email letting you know how you did in the past month. And one last thing, if one of your signs up for a paid account, you get 25% cash commission from their first year of subscription (details).

So if you’ve been thinking about sharing FreshBooks with your colleagues and network, go ahead and share away!  We’ll continue to do our best every day to do you right by it.

Have you met Leafy? He’s usually found doing the grunt work on the FreshBooks blog for scheduled maintenance. However, Leafy is a little tired of charming you only from the blog – he wants to meet you and see the world!  So we’re sending Leafy on a world tour to visit with customers, get cultured, and take in the sights.

Stop number one? Beautiful (and romantic!) Niagara Falls, Ontario!  In fact…he’s already been there!

The big question is, “where should Leafy go next?!” We’d like to put him up with you, a wonderful FreshBooks customer who is willing to show him a good time and take some photos to send back to the FreshBooks team.  You’re also responsible for sending him on his next trip, which we’ll e-mail you the details for (and cover the travel/shipping costs) once you send back the photos of his stay with you.

If you’re a FreshBooks customer willing to help show Leafy the world, send him an email (leafy[at]freshbooks[dot]com), and he’ll hop on the first flight to your door! You can also keep up to date with his travels on Twitter.

We miss you already Leafy – don’t stay away too long!

Have you met Leafy? He’s usually found doing the grunt work on the FreshBooks blog for scheduled maintenance. However, Leafy is a little tired of charming you only from the blog – he wants to meet you and see the world!  So we’re sending Leafy on a world tour to visit with customers, get cultured, and take in the sights.

Stop number one? Beautiful (and romantic!) Niagara Falls, Ontario!  In fact…he’s already been there!

The big question is, “where should Leafy go next?!” We’d like to put him up with you, a wonderful FreshBooks customer who is willing to show him a good time and take some photos to send back to the FreshBooks team.  You’re also responsible for sending him on his next trip, which we’ll e-mail you the details for (and cover the travel/shipping costs) once you send back the photos of his stay with you.

If you’re a FreshBooks customer willing to help show Leafy the world, send him an email (leafy[at]freshbooks[dot]com), and he’ll hop on the first flight to your door! You can also keep up to date with his travels on Twitter.

We miss you already Leafy – don’t stay away too long!

Special thanks to a great guest poster, Jason Blumer, for this post! Jason is a CPA, Partner, and Head Creative Dude at Blumer & Associates, CPAs, PC. Jason’s an innovative, smart thinker who knows his stuff. Thanks Jason!

You can also check out Do I Really Need an Accounting Package (Part 1) to read more!

The use of the right accounting package depends on whether you are a sole proprietor or whether you are a corporation. For the most part, a sole proprietor only needs single-entry bookkeeping (which tracks Profit and Loss), and a corporation requires double-entry bookkeeping (which tracks Assets, Liabilities and Equity in addition to Profit and Loss).

Among other things, the type of bookkeeping you need (single vs. double) determines what type of accounting package you need (are we having fun yet? ).

So it goes like this:

1. First, know which type of tax entity you should be (sole proprietor vs. corporation)
2. Second, determine the accounting package you need

A couple of points about the first step above, determining which tax entity you should be:

1. Start your business as a sole proprietor. It’s the easiest form of tax entity to manage, and the cheapest to start (in the US). But if you start making a lot of profit, then it is a stinky tax trap.
2. Become a corporation only if you have significant profit (maybe around $70,000 USD or so per year). Corporations are a lot more complicated to manage but they offer a lot more avenues to save on taxes.

Truly, you don’t really need to know all this stuff about single and double entry bookkeeping because smart web apps like FreshBooks do the behind the scenes stuff without you even knowing it. To build a smart web app like this is actually pretty tricky because you have to build it to look pretty, while disguising the fact that it is doing some accounting on the back end. It’s hard to make bookkeeping sexy, but FreshBooks has done a great job!

All you need to do is:

1. Use the system consistently,
2. Develop some basic processes within your company that help you manage your work and clients,
3. Watch your cash, and
4. Be bold enough charge what you are worth.

Systems like FreshBooks help do all of this for you, it’s the humans in the businesses that get lazy and foolish about their business. I don’t want you to become an accountant, but I do want you to be a smart business owner. And being a smart business owner means you have to do more than just perform your trade – you have to manage your time and other people, collect money from clients and negotiate contracts.

Why should you know all of this? Because your business is your life blood. Your business pays for your groceries and your car insurance. You may be a great plumber or a one-of-a-kind illustrator, but if you don’t know who owes you money or what your year-to-date profit is then you are operating in the blind. And that is just foolish.

A few points of summary,

• Don’t do your accounting (whether single or double entry) in Excel (or Numbers),
• Don’t produce your invoices in Word (or Pages),
• Consider your online accounting system your roadmap to your future (with a great trail of paid invoices in the past),
• Don’t become a corporation unless you have to,
• But become a corporation when you have to,
• Find and USE a smart web app like FreshBooks to manage your sole proprietorship or corporation,
• Go find an astute web-savvy CPA to give you counsel and help you make more money

Get in touch!
Jason M. Blumer, CPA, CFE
Website: www.blumercpas.com
Blog: thriveal.com
Email: jason@blumercpas.com
Skype: jason.m.blumer
Twitter: @jasonmblumer

When the cornerstone of your company is rockstar customer support, there are always a few companies that you look to as an example for providing extraordinary experiences everyday, and Zappos is high on the list. So the FreshBooks support team took a field trip down to Las Vegas and experience first hand, how the Zappos team do what they do.

Our day started when Julie picked us up in the Zappos bus:

After a short drive down the highway, we arrived at the Zappos office and posed for a picture:

Note the common denominator in both pics: hotness.

After pictures and a lot high fives from the Zappos team, we started our tour and one-on-ones with their Training and Customer Advocacy teams. We could write an entire series of blog posts on everything we learned (not to mention a ton of fan fiction), but here are our summarized take aways:

• Zappos puts a huge focus on employee goals. Their Goals Coach, Augusta, is focused on helping their staff achieve both professional and personal goals, and they have awards and milestones for employees who reach them. It’s not full on counseling, but it’s more than a pat on the back – it’s genuine give-a-damn about employee success on and off the job. And it’s flat-out extraordinary.
• Culture and history are extremely important. Before the tour started, there’s a full history lesson from Mig Pascual on how Zappos was founded, and how the core values were developed. The 10 core values of Zappos are written on every staff member’s name tag, and while not everyone knows them all off by heart, everyone can name at least 7.
• Training is an established process with clear milestones. Next on the tour was meeting Roger from the training team and he showed us the ropes. Training at Zappos is a lot like a university degree – there are required courses, electives, classrooms, and if you fail a test (and there ARE tests) you have to repeat the course. Fail too many times and you’re in trouble. Training is all focused around the core values, so if someone is not ‘getting’ things then it’s a good indicator they may not be a great fit.
• Employees’ well being is a huge focus. During the tour from Marie and Mig, you see A LOT of the Zappos office and one thing is clear: from the goal counselling, to nap rooms, subsidized cafeterias and incredible medical benefits, Zappos takes care of its employees. We’ve even decided to implement a few ideas ourselves. The nap room and free ice cream are pretty high on our list.
• Every team is a cohesive unit. When the tour entered the HR department, they played “Eye of the Tiger” and shook Shake-Weights at us. The executive area is called “Monkey Row” and has a jungle motif. Each team feels like a family and it looks like they have a great time.

All in all Zappos was an amazing experience on two fronts. On the one hand, we learned that a lot of the support stuff we’re already doing, like having no limit for call times and encouraging our staff to go above and beyond to solve customer problems, is exactly what we should be doing. That’s a nice feeling.

On the other hand, there are definitely some new strategies we’re looking at trying out, and we got some great insight on how to scale our company culture as we grow. Zappos and FreshBooks both started as a few people in a small office, and it’s good to know that as we grow we can take our culture and experiences with us.