Our heartiest congratulations go to all the staff at CPAWS who have worked incredibly hard this year to preserve Canada’s unique wilderness.

*Note: If you are interested in donating to CPAWS more information can be found on their site.

This month is about to bring some interesting changes at Simple Station as I am heading to London for the month of November, followed by an extended business trip to Boston and possibly New York until the middle of January. Before leaving I took one last opportunity to grab my surfboard and head out to Jordan River. The waves were beautiful and I will miss the west-coast, but opportunities in London and on the east-coast beckon. New frontiers await.

Our client work will continue as normal as the rest of the Simple Station team remains in Victoria and I will still be working and accessible via email / skype / gchat / twitter.

A passion for outdoor activities, fishing in Tierra del Fuego | Photograph by Doug Tompkins

“I’m kind of like a samurai,” says Yvon Chouinard, founder of outdoor-apparel maker Patagonia. “They say if you want to be a samurai, you can’t be afraid of dying, and as soon as you flinch, you get your head cut off. I’m not afraid of losing this business.”

He may actually mean that. Ever since Chouinard began forging mountain-climbing pitons in 1957 and selling them out of his car, he has defined his business’s bottom line as something other than pure profit.

Here are a few things from the Web Worker Daily article you might want to think about the next time you need to pick a name.

• Is the domain name available? Is it available as a .com domain?
• Is it unique and memorable?
• Does it fit well with your business and the image you want to project?
• Will the name grow with you or limit you later?
• Will it be confused with other names?
• Are there any obvious jokes about crickets or anything else that might get annoying?
• Can people spell the name?
• Is it short enough not to be annoying when typing it on an iPhone or other mobile device?

A lot of the plans share the same features (unlimited clients, invoices, projects etc.) and are quite similarly matched. I won’t cover the minor differences and instead will focus on what each does well and what it does not.

Freshbooks

Pros:

1. SSL 256-Bit Encryption for all plans. This made us feel our financial data was very safe and secure.
2. Tracks invoices (both regular and recurring), expenses, estimates. You can filter invoices by invoice id, client, date, and status which is handy when searching for a particular invoice.
3. Report Cards that allow you to gauge how you’re doing vs. what your industry averages. This is a really nice feature and a great morale booster.
4. Ability to invoice your clients via Snail Mail.
5. Ability to turn support tickets and estimates into invoices.
6. Sends an email to a client with a link to their invoice. This allows you to track when you clients viewed the invoice and is very handy in resolving payment disputes like “oh I didn’t get that email”.
7. Ability to create “Items” which can be products or services that can be added to any invoice in a generic way.
8. Ability to theme the look and feel of the client login area.
9. Can tie in to a number of online payment gateways.
10. You can create a credit on a  client account.

Cons:

1. Time tracking is difficult when you have multiple employees. We frequently ended up tallying up hours by hand at the end of the month simply because you can’t see how many hours you’ve worked between x date and y date without being an administrator. This was fixed in a recent update of Freshbooks.
2. Project management is dismal. Although you can create projects and associate tasks to those projects it is done in such a way that is both confusing and difficult to navigate. A larger problem is that you can’t specify how long a task should take and then monitor how many hours into a certain task (or project) you are. Harvest is much better in this regard.
3. The reports suck. Yes this may sound harsh but in general I have found them absolutely useless. Their formatting in general is bad and unless you spend hours tinkering them in excel to be a little more presentable they generally aren’t helpful. Case in point today our book keeper was over and wanted to print off all our invoices between June and October. She went to Reports in Freshbooks and then selected the Invoice Report. It then proceeded to spit out a report with all the invoices added one after another. The problem here is that if there are multiple pages attached to a certain invoice, they will often only fit into 1/2 of another page. The other 1/2 of the page is given to another invoice and so you end up with pages of invoices that are just mashed together. You also cannot specify how you would like the reports sorted (date range, client etc.) in an easy to read way.
4. Although in general I do like the support ticketing system I don’t like that it emails my client every time I update the ticket. At the very least it would be nice to choose whether you want the client to be notified by email of support ticket updates or not.
5. Invoice templates are rather nasty. The formatting isn’t great and there is no way to include a line break without drawing —– or ~~~~~~ across a line.
6. No way to approve staff time sheets.
7. Forces clients to click a link to get a copy of the invoice. In our experience this has resulted in clients missing payments as they simply ignore or miss the link in the email. While we were using Freshbooks many clients asked us specifically to send them a PDF invoice instead of a link which amounted to us having to print a pdf within Freshbooks and email it to them manually.
8. Emails for invoices, estimates or support tickets sent to your clients are very generic and boring. There is no html email option.
9. The dashboard isn’t particularly informative or useful. All it shows is the recent activity on your account (invoices sent, estimates sent, support tickets generated), and a snapshot of your income over the past 3 months. The lack of any kind of project management or timeline snapshot leaves much to be desired.

Harvest

Pros:

1. The best for project management between the three. You can create tasks on a given project, and then estimate hours on tasks. When you log hours against that task it will automatically subtract the hours you have worked from the hours you estimated. If you go over the estimate it highlights how many hours you are over in red (See conclusion for screenshot). This feature has kept our projects increasingly within budget and on-time. It has also kept our clients happier since we can tell them exactly how far they are into a project in a snap.
2. The dashboard is actually very useful and gives you a great snapshot of  project timelines, what you invoiced last month, what your revenue has been for the current year, what you invoiced this month and how many hours you’ve worked this week / month. It definitely kills Freshbooks on this point.
3. Time tracking is much more simple than it is in Freshbooks. In my opinion it provides a better interface as well.
4. Well designed dashboard and iphone widgets for time tracking.
5. Offers “time sheet approval” which allows an administrator to approve staff time sheets.
6. Sends both a text copy of the invoice in the email to the client in addition to a attached pdf invoice.
7. Ability to change the look and feel of the administration area.
8. Offers the ability to track expenses and re bill them to clients.
9. Integration with Basecamp
10. Killer integration with Harvest Co-op which is a great work flow application for agile development teams.

Cons:

1. Recurring invoices is not as nice as Freshbooks as you cannot search or sort recurring invoices. This would be very problematic for someone who has a lot of recurring invoices.
2. No way to filter invoices by status, date, client etc.
3. Does not have the ability to tie in directly to any major payment gateways other than Paypal.
4. SSL is only available for the $90/mo business plan, which is ridiculous and may be a problem for teams concerned about data security since passwords and login information is transmitted in plain text and is not secure without paying for the premium plan. Freshbooks has an advantage on this point as they offer SSL on all their plans (Even the free one). Blinksale offers SSL starting at $12 a month. They just added this feature. SSL is now enabled for all plans. (June 1st, 2009)
5. No ability to define when your fiscal year starts/ends. Since most people don’t have their fiscal year tied to the calendar year the report for your income this year (based on this calendar year) isn’t all that helpful since it is not your fiscal year.
6. No support tickets or issue tracking.
7. No ability to create estimates.
8. No ability to credit a client account.

BLINKSALE

Pros:

1. Simple, clean invoicing solution. Out of the three solutions it is most definitely the most minimalist both in terms of the interface but also the features.
2. Pretty invoices and thank-you messages.
3. Offers “time sheet approval” which allows an administrator to approve staff time sheets.
4. When you receive an invoice from another Blinksale subscriber, you can add it to your Purchases page.

Cons:

1. No integrated time tracking or project management.
2. Does not have the ability to tie in directly to any major payment gateways other than Paypal.
3. Does not have the ability to create estimates.
4. No ability to customize the back-end to the look and feel of your organization.

Pricing

The three invoicing solutions do have fairly similar pricing however they differ on a number of points. Take a look through the pricing models and figure out what works best for you and your team. The following images illustrate the differences in pricing between the three invoicing solutions and should help you make a decision:

Freshbooks Pricing

Harvest Pricing

Blinksale Pricing

Summary

Blinksale is perfect for you if you are a freelancer, have only 1 employee and just really want a simple invoicing solution that will present beautiful invoices to your clients. Things start getting tricky with Blinksale once you start wanting to track time, or have multiple people who need to use the application since you can only create one user so we moved away from this solution once we started getting more staff on board. The customization of the invoice templates is truly lovely though. Blinksale is definitely not a good solution if you do send a lot of invoices in a month as their invoice caps are relatively low compared to the other applications which offer unlimited invoicing.

Freshbooks is by far the most feature rich of all three web apps. If you need to send clients invoices via snail mail or want to tie your invoicing platform to a major payment gateway then certainly Freshbooks is the solution for you.The problem I’ve found is that while it seems to do almost everything it doesn’t do anything particularly well. The interface tries very hard to be simple, but unfortunately is cluttered by interface duplication. Take for example the screenshot below which shows the client tab selected, but a second row of tabs is also introduced and the client tab is once again repeated. Very messy.

Additionally we have found that many of the reports just didn’t seem readable, the formatting was terrible and it became a chore to sift through spreadsheets and try to organize our financial information. Of the three solutions Freshbooks was by far the most frustrating to use and we tried to stick with it for the better part of 1 year before discovering Harvest. The best way I can describe Freshbooks is that the interface is quite simply, unintuitive compared to the other solutions. I’d love to have a crack at redesigning their interface.

Harvest is our favorite out of the three web apps and blends simplicity with a substantial feature set. Pricing is straight forward, time sheets are amazing, and project time tracking is by far and away what makes this our current choice. See the screenshot below that shows the breakdown of a recent project we completed. As you can see it’s easy to spot where you are over your estimated hours and where you are under.

Additionally I must say we’ve also been extremely satisfied by how hardworking the Harvest team has been. When we first signed up we let them know that we really needed to be able to add two taxes to an invoice and although they didn’t have the ability to do that at the time they listened to us (and perhaps other users asking the same thing) and built the feature into the application a few short weeks later. Over the course of time we have been using Harvest the application has got better and better with frequent tweaks and updates. Lastly I must also add that Harvest Co-op which is a free work flow and team management application that integrates with Harvest is AWESOME. We’ve started using it every day as part of our agile development methodology and it has really worked out well for us by enabling us to see what each of us has on the agenda for the day and check what we accomplished yesterday. It’s minimized the amount we need to scrum and it has been a productivity booster.

We highly recommend Harvest and are now using it as an integral part of our work flow, invoicing, time tracking and project management.

Links

If you have any questions feel free to post them below.

Most big corporations have neither the focus, the skills, nor the appetite for risk to build mass-produced products that feel as if they were made by high-priced boutiques in New York or London. While computer companies have focused on pinching pennies these past few decades, Apple has been perfecting its design game. The fact that rivals are now talking about design is not proof they’re catching up — but of how far they have to go.

True in 2006, still true today. Amazing how somethings change and others remain constant. Apple has proved its consistency and at the helm is Jonathan Ive.

Read More: BusinessWeek “Who is Jonathan Ive?”

Want to know the top secrets of Remote Viewing? In this book has details step by step methods to master this skill. Sapphire has mastered many skills including Remote Viewing and The Third Eye. Contents include: How to achieve Remote Viewing, how to do it correctly, how not to get spotted when you are Remote Viewing, and how to sense someone is Remote Viewing you, and how to turn down a Remote Viewing, and how to view out of space. Also, includes The Third Eye Viewing as a bonus for this book. Want to be a super human being? Having X-Ray eyes? This is the book for you.

Source: Amazon

Possibly the worst marketing copy I’ve ever read.

Have you ever needed to email someone – a stranger, asking them for a favor? How can one compose email such that they will be read and responded to? How do we effectively email someone who gets a lot of email?

Whether personal or business, the ability to compose efficient and effective email is super useful – both in terms of productivity and responsiveness.

We’re all busy, and we’ve all received long, ambiguous and rambling email. Ironically, most of us have also been guilty of writing such verbose email while requesting for someone else’s time.

Source: 15 Tips for Writing Effective Email

In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email (bit.ly/email2). So people who check their email every five minutes waste 81/2hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

Source: smh.com.au/nwes/biztech

This is a stunning statistic and I can definitely see the effect that rampant email checking can have in the workplace. In our dynamic office environment I’ve been trying to keep to checking email to 3-4 times per day. I find that once in the morning, once after lunch, and once closer to the end of the day really helps keep my focus task oriented. Apparently it also saves me 8.5 hours a week just in refocusing time according to this. One of the biggest reasons I’ve ran with this approach to checking email is that it also allows me to get through email in a very rapid way by batching writing emails together at one time. Just a few bits of food for thought.