Freshbooks

Muddita Shekhawat talks to us about FreshBooks.

The accounting software designed for the serviced-based small business owner.


Mudita Shekhawat, Business Development Representative at FreshBooks.
mshekhawat@freshbooks.com

Why FreshBooks?

Mike McDerment, a self-employed designer did not have a very good system for tracking time, expenses and invoicing. One day after spending hours on writing an invoice he mistakenly save it over another invoice. He knew there had to be a better way. There wasn’t anything on the market that could track his jobs and invoices in a simple way. The inspiration for Freshbooks was born.

Freshbook was started in 2003. Based in Toronto it now has over 275 employees and services over 10 million small business in the US and Canada. It is the #1 cloud accounting and invoicing software solution designed for small business owners.

Today’s employers are hiring more freelancers and contract workers. Chances are you will be freelancing or on contract. Keeping tract of your work becomes a bigger chore. There will be more chances to lose receipts and forget to invoice. Doing your own bookkeeping also uses valuable time you could be using to design and get more work. Freshbooks can help you manage this. It tracks your time and manages your billing and invoicing to ensure you get paid for all your work and frees up time for you to design.

About FreshBooks

Everyone who joins FreshBooks be it a CEO, developer or designer spends their first month with the support team. They learn the product. Take customer calls and answer customer emails. This helps them learn about the product and what customers are thinking.

Design at FreshBooks

FreshBooks is called a Fin-Tech company (Financial-Technical company). The Product Development team is the largest department. All the other teams work to support it. The Product Development team consists of the Product Owner, UX Designer, Scrum Master and a few Developers. Their focus is customers. Design is used to make the software easy and simple to use.

Design Process at FreshBooks

The team is given a customer pain-point hypothesis. For example we created a feature and no one is using it or we created this feature and our support team is getting a lot of calls about how to use it. It’s that team’s job to figure out the issues and how to solve it.

There are three types of Risks to keep in mine when building a solution that actually solves the customer’s problem.
1. Product Risk – Is there a solution already existing within the software that can be used?
2. Customer Risk – Do you know who the customer is?
3. Market Risk – Will someone pay to use this feature or will it attract new customers?

Using the Lean Canvas helps the team figure out the Risks. Start with what you know about the customers. Next validate, talk with your customers. Now you can work on solving the problem, build the feature and launch it. But it doesn’t end there. You may need to go back and do it again. Add new functionalities, change it up, iteration is part of the process.

How to get a FreshBooks account

Visit:
www.freshbooks.com/sheridan-trafalgar
Free access for 2 months

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