Timesheets and Stopwatches – Yay, Freshbooks!

After all that wondering about confessional stuff last night, today I am moved to post about something a little less personal – but actually, no word of a lie, close to my heart in its own way. I am here to tell you about Freshbooks.

Freshbooks is a Toronto company, offering an incredibly useful service to people like me. For a couple of years (why, why didn't anyone tell me it could be so much easier) I used to do all my time tracking and invoicing using a painful system of silly Word documents and Excel spreadsheets on my hard drive. The pain of using Microsoft office tools was made worse by the inefficiency of my system, not to mention the total lack of style. I hope you can understand why a non-designer like me never did bother to make my Word invoice template look pretty.

But that all changed about six weeks ago, when I discovered Freshbooks.

The first thing I did was to create an invoice for work I had already done – it took about 2 minutes, I emailed it away to the client, it looked marvelous, and I was hooked.

The next week, I decided to try out their Timesheet function. How glorious! It does everything I was doing in Excel, only it does it way better. You enter your client, you enter the project, you enter the task. You enter your hours. Then later, you generate an invoice based on those hours. Of course!

Today, things got even better. I decided to play with the little stopwatch feature. It's pretty basic, I guess – you enter what project and task you're working on, and you hit "start". You can pause, or you can stop, and then you can send those hours automatically to your timesheet. Now, this stopwatch won't do you much good if you're working offline (airplanes, non-wifi cafes, cottage, whatever), but other than that, all good.

I've never actually worked with a stopwatch or timer before. And this may be obvious to other people who *have* used such a thing before... but I felt like it seriously enhanced my focus. I am rather too prone to succumbing to distractions, and to flipping around all over the place while I'm working – even though I know that it's an inefficient way to work, most of the time. With the timer running, I felt some sense of obligation to actually just stick to the task at hand, and I stayed with it until it was finished (save a phone call that I decided to take, and I just hit "pause" for that).

All this to say that I really like Freshbooks, and I think that you should consider giving them a whirl. (Full disclosure: the links above are all to my personal "referrer page" with them, something which all users get. But even if there wasn't a referral program, I'd still be writing this blog post.) For an independent contractor with 3 or fewer current clients, you can get away with using the free service. But their service can also be used by businesses with much more complex needs than mine. As I said – local Toronto company, great people, responsive to customer needs, and a very useful service. Happy Time Tracking!