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.

The 15 Best Mac Performance Tuning Applications and Tips

1. Disable Dashboard Widgets. Each dashboard widget you enable consumes both processing power and valuable memory. To disable widgets and speed up your mac follow these steps:
   • Open up terminal.app located in Applications > Utilities > Terminal
   • Copy this, paste it in the terminal and hit enter: defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
   • Then enter this: killall Dock
   • That’s it! Dashboard widgets are now disabled
2. Run the Mac OS X disk repair utility location in Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility and then run repair disk permissions.  See this article on the repair functions of the disk utility.
3. Download and run Monolingual to remove all the additional languages that are built into OS X by default and you are likely to never use. I removed everything except English, Spanish, German and French since those are core languages on websites I sometimes frequent.
4. Download and run XSlimmer to remove all unnecessary PPC (PowerPC) code from Universal Binaries. Only use this if you are using an Intel based Mac. Additionally it is worthwhile noting that I had problems with Photoshop after slimming the application, so perhaps avoid using XSlimmer on CS3 or CS4.
5. Download and run OnyX. Run the daily, weekly and monthly scripts. Clear out all log files.
6. Removing unnecessary login items by going to System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items. Note that in order to actually remove a login item you need to select the item and then hit the minus button at the bottom of the preferences screen.
7. Even though Mac OS X has a journaled filesystem that should automatically handle defragmentation on the fly, it doesn’t do a great job of keeping the drive from becoming fragmented. iDefrag solves these problems and more, by defragmenting and optimizing your Mac’s filesystem at boot time. All you have to do is restart your computer, run the iDefrag boot DVD and it will defragment the entire hard-drive. I noticed a substantial performance boost (I would say up to around 20%) after using this.
8. Minimize by using the scale effect by going to System Preferences > Dock and changing the default from the Genie effect to the Scale effect. Also you can uncheck “animate opening applications” to boost performance.
9. Ensure you have a minimum of 10% disk space available so that OS X can run effectively. If you don’t have this much space free try using GrandPerspective to determine what is using space on your hard drive and what you might be able to delete.
10. Remove fonts that you don’t use. You can do this by going to the finder and removing fonts from your home folder > library > fonts.
11. Turn off Universal Access by navigating to System Preferences > Universal Access and turn off anything you’re not using.
12. Turn off Bluetooth by navigating to to System Preferences > Bluetooth.
13. Turn off Internet Sharing by navigating to to System Preferences > Sharing > Internet.
14. Check the Activity Monitor located in Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor to see if there is anything running that is consuming processing or memory resources. This should go without saying.
15. On older computers you may notice massive performance issues particularly when Spotlight is running. To avoid these issues disable spotlight from indexing your entire hard-drive. You can do this by navigating to System Preferences > Spotlight and then unticking anything that you don’t want to see in search results. If you hit the Privacy tab you can also remove specific folders. I typically remove the Library folder, and also the System folder.

4 Command Line Performance Tuning Tips

1. You can speed up TCP connections by opening the terminal.app and typing pico /etc/sysctl.conf and adding the following lines to the file:
   net.inet.tcp.mssdflt=1460
net.inet.tcp.sendspace=262144
net.inet.tcp.recvspace=262144
net.inet.udp.recvspace=74848
net.inet.udp.maxdgram=65535
2. You can speed up SSH connections by opening the terminal.app and typing pico ~/.ssh_config and adding the following lines to the file:
   host *
controlmaster auto
controlpath /tmp/ssh-%r@%h:%p
It should be noted here that this may cause some glitches as I have run into some odd controlmaster errors after implementing this command. You can always try it and remove the code if it gives you problems.
3. Disable dashboard by opening up the terminal.app and running the command:
   defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
   and then run killall dock to restart the dock.
4. To optimize firefox’s tab/bookmarks/cache databases on OSX, close firefox, open terminal.app and run #cd ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles; for i in */*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $i VACUUM;done; cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles; for i in */*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $i VACUUM;done;

The Missing Manual on OS X

David Pogue’s missing manual on Mac OS X also covers maintenance related tasks, and is a great starter for those users who want to learn more on the intricacies of OS X. For those not familiar with using Terminal or the command line there is a really helpful chapter on this in specific.

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.

Taking a browse through LifeHacker today I caught this post on making Powerpoint slides less boring through the use of photographing stickies. Just one more way you can bring a unique style to those important presentations. I thought the idea was great.