> On Sun, 2010-04-25 at 19:03 -0400, Dylan Bouterse wrote: >> We are considering Freshbooks for billing and so far are very >> impressed with the simplicity and functionality of Freshbooks. >> For those who are using it, what has your experience been? Have >> you had any support issues and what has their support response >> been like? Have you made any feature requests and have they >> been receptive? At this point I'm looking for reasons to not >> use it as I can't seem to find any/many. I'd like to see some >> sort of agent/reseller integration though. > > Dylan, > I am not an ISP, but I have several ISP customers who are using FB. I > use FreshBooks for my consulting as well. It does a great job of > reducing workload for entering payments (because they are somewhat > automated if the customer pays online), it can do automated billing and > even charge customer's card automatically if you have authorize.net or > another processor that supports that feature. As for feature requests, > I've made only ONE feature request since I've been using FB (over 2 > years now). That feature was added less than 6 months after I asked, > and was in beta (which I was able to use) for about 3 of those 6 months. > I've been VERY pleased with them. > > One thing that is a sort of "gotcha", though, is that they are really > not a full bookkeeping application, so you'll need to do your "normal" > accounting somewhere else. Also there is very little that you can do to > automate WISP business processes outside of the actual billing and > receiving of payments. This thread started as a followup to a call > about how one could go about integrating FB with Mikrotik, but it could > be applied to ANY of the common WISP systems. My suggestion to Bryan (I > don't think it was Bryan that called, actually) was to use the API that > FreshBooks makes available and build a "payment page" or something there > that will allow customers to make payments via a web server on your end > and then you can automate SOME of those processes by using perl or > whatever your preferred language is. I think they have perl, c/c++ and > PHP APIs available, though I could be wrong on those options. Use of > the API was never something that I needed, so I have absolutely NO > experience with that feature of FB. > > -- > ******************************************************************** > * Butch Evans * Professional Network Consultation* > * http://www.butchevans.com/ * Network Engineering * > * http://store.wispgear.net/ * Wired or Wireless Networks * > * http://blog.butchevans.com/ * ImageStream, Mikrotik and MORE! * > ******************************************************************** >
Butch, very good information and thank you for the feedback. We would look to use FB primarily for the estimate/invoice/recurring billing. I think we'll be doing a decent amount of API calls via PHP to pull invoice/customer info from FB into our customer interface. I'm disappointed there isn't an agent/reseller system but there has been a request for that and I've voiced my interest in that as well. Within a couple of hours we signed up for a free account with FB, customized the interface, email templates, set up some test clients and generated estimates, invoices, and statements. Super easy and very cool. I think we'll get 95% of what we need from FB and what we can't do, we'll custom write for now. Butch, if you hit me up offline and send me a referral link I'll see if I can get the nice people at FB to give you credit for our signup. Thanks again! Dylan _______________________________________________ Mikrotik mailing list [email protected] http://www.butchevans.com/mailman/listinfo/mikrotik Visit http://blog.butchevans.com/ for tutorials related to Mikrotik RouterOS
