Freshbooks Integration!

It would be great to see integration with the FreshBooks API in order to turn time tracked in DeskAway into the invoices that actually get us paid.

To effectively run detailed invoices while also taking full advantage of DeskAway's reports you have to enter your time in two different apps.

Given the overwhelming popularity of FreshBooks among the web app user community who run service-based companies I think it would bring DeskAway more into the forefront (where it belongs). IMHO DeskAway is the best kept secret I've found after demoing about a dozen of the "most popular" project management web apps.

There are already four other PM apps that integrate with FreshBooks, and I believe they have increased their exposure because of it: http://community.freshbooks.com/addons/

Just a thought, and our company would really benefit from this. Thanks for your consideration!

Yes, you're exactly right, this would be the main point of the integration and a huge benefit for anyone using these two systems.

Another great idea would be being able to track expenses on projects (just like we can track time) and those expenses get pushed over to FreshBooks as well. But in DeskAway you could see where those expenses are coming from and generate an Expense Report. However, this would involve adding an expense tracking feature into DeskAway :)

Great to hear this is already in the works, please keep us posted. You guys rock!

That's a great question. I think we would want all the time automatically pushed over.

If you could specify by each milestone that might prove to be more beneficial. If someone wants to bill out each milestone on separate invoices they could have a FB project setup for each DA Milestone. I have attached an example of how this "could" look.



The other option is just to use one FB project for the entire DA project. But I do not think the names need to match. If you are selecting from a dropdown list which project you want to sync to it shouldn't matter.

What do you think?

It seems quite impractical to program for a scenario where each milestone is a separate billable. It seems out of the norm for how projects would typically be managed. Tasks, maybe, but the way FreshBooks is set up, you would burn through a lot of your allotted project quota (assuming you weren't paying huge bucks for the unlimited plan).

By the way, most projects are initiated in FreshBooks via the estimate feature. Standardizing a set of tasks that line up with a pre-fab DeskAway project template would be my approach. It would be helpful if DeskAway could talk to FreshBooks to pull down new project information and link to a standardized project template specified in the settings for project types -- a sort of new project automation that tells DeskAway from the outset that time tracking data should be shared with FreshBooks on a particular project.

webmagnetix, this sounds like a cool idea.

since we have standardized hourly rates for personnel we have setup our tasks in FB to reflect that (i.e. Staff, Analyst, Engineer, etc.) so when we enter time in DA it would be ideal to then select which FB task it should be billed as.

then when viewing a FB invoice in detailed mode, for instance, you would see the FB "Analyst" task and the detailed work performed at that hourly rate (i.e. Setup server, ) which is pulled from each individual DA task that entered time for the FB task "Analyst".

have you seen how Zendesk integrates with FB? the widget they created is a good, simple example, i think.

it's CRUCIAL that the client be listed along with the project name, so many apps that integrate with FB only list the project name.

and if there is anyone else out there like me who has a lot of "Web Design" projects this is so frustrating! it forces me to put the client name in the project name, which i HATE! :)

awesome! very simple and straightforward.

regarding the client/project name I see exactly what you mean. but do you see how zendesk did it? simply putting the client name before the project name so as a user i at least know what i'm mapping to...otherwise we have no way of telling who it belongs to

Excellent! I have setup the integration (nice instructions by the way) and I will give some feedback once we've used it for a while.

Thank you! :)