In a small business, efficiency is critical. Each task that needs doing ends up distracting us from other tasks that need doing too. One way we’ve saved a bunch of time is by using Freshbooks for billing.

What’s Freshbooks?

Freshbooks is a nifty little service that makes online invoicing simple, fast, and easy.

How do we use it?

• When customers select a product to purchase on our Confluence Plugin licensing page, we automatically generate an invoice for the customer using the Freshbooks API. We save time here because we don’t have to generate an invoice manually.
• Freshbooks handles credit card orders for us. We saved more time here because we didn’t have to write single line of code to implement a checkout process…. Freshbooks handles it for us.
• Freshbooks keeps track of our monthly revenue totals. Nobody has to plug numbers into a spreadsheet to generate a report. At midnight on August 31st I knew exactly how much we billed in August by reading these reports. Again, a huge time saver.
• Best of all, Freshbooks is all online. This means it’s easy for me and the rest of the Gliffy team to collaborate on invoices, and stay on top of things.

I’ve met the guys from Freshbooks a few times now, and they are great people to boot. If you’re doing manual invoicing now, definitely consider taking a look at Freshbooks… it could be a huge time saver for you and your business.

Gliffy is a ‘virtual business’. This means we don’t have a physical office from which we work out of. In fact, we have contractors and employees working for us who live all over the world:

One of the challenges we have to deal with in a virtual office environment is how to handle incoming snail mail. We receive snail mail for all sorts of stuff:

• Checks from customers
• Bills from credit cards and vendors we work with
• Bank statements

Originally, we had all this snail mail sent to my apartment here in San Francisco, but recently the influx of mail started to become overwhelming. Fortunately, about a year ago we signed up for a nifty remote mail service called Earth Class Mail.

What is a remote mail service? The basic idea is that it’s a service which scans all of your physical snail mail and makes it available online. The process looks something like this:

• Mail is received by secure mail handling facility
• Depending on the addressee, the mail is sorted into the correct virtual mailbox automatically
• An email is sent to notify the recipient mail has arrived
• Mail facility scans the item
• Recipient reads the mail

By using Earth Class Mail , we have drastically reduced the time it takes to handle mail in our business. This diagram below shows the process flow of mail at Gliffy.

We get several benefits from handling our mail this way:

• Mail is automatically sorted - nobody has to spend time sorting the mail that comes in, and this saves us time.
• The intended recipient knows that the mail came in right away via email
• Snail mail can be read from anywhere - Since all the mail is scanned and online, we can read the mail from anyplace we can access the internet
• All mail is archived and easily accessible online anytime we need it
• If I ever move, we wont have to spend a bunch of time notifying our customers of our new address since our mailing address doesn’t need to change.

As a small business owner, I’ve benefited the most from this system. I used to spend a few hours a week dealing with mail, keeping it organized, and depositing checks as they came in. Now, we’ve been able to delegate these tasks in an efficient manner without loosing physical control of the mail itself.