PICnet Blog

As Non-Profit Soapbox continues to grow in popularity, our hours spent doing invoicing each month continues to grow as well. Our joy of working with QuickBooks seems to decrease proportionally with the swelling number of clients.

Being a company steeped in the Web, I began wondering recently if there’s a better way of managing our invoices. Currently, we have to manually use QuickBooks to create invoices and receipts, then PDF them, then email them. This ends up adding up to about 5 hours a month, which I’d rather have spent on new Soapbox innovations.

About 6 months ago I signed us up for Freshbooks, an online invoicing system well accepted by the Web 2.0 world. Freshbooks seems made for people just starting out with invoicing, and those that might not already be using QuickBooks. For instance, QuickBooks is our master accounting records, and where we record active clients. With Freshbooks, it seems like we’d need to duplicate our efforts by posting invoices in both our QuickBooks and Freshbooks.
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We PICnetters use Basecamp for project management and when we learned they had released an API and saw the interesting things people were doing with it, we thought, “hey let’s integrate”. Not because it’s cool (though the closer we get to Web 2.0 tools, the cooler we all seem here around the office), but because we saw a need, at least internally, for some extended functionality: easy time tracking and reporting.

Basecamp allows time tracking and it is very nice when checking off a task to record how many hours you spent getting it done. But sometimes we get so engrossed in our work we forget when we started. So, we built a sort of stop-watch application which allows us to punch-in, punch-out, write up a description then send it off to Basecamp.

Another pet peeve of ours is when we run over the number of hours we’ve dedicated to a project, and with several people contributing time to a project that can happen easily if the time isn’t closely monitored. So next up on the integration effort is to develop a warning system which will alert project managers when we’re nearing that limit.

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