Using FreshBooks for your web application’s billing
freshbooks.com
freshbooks.com
You can also email me at sunir splat freshbooks dot com.
1. Does Freshbooks do more than just Invoicing?
2. If somebody buys something from our website, do we have to send them to one of your landing pages to processes their payment or can we interact with Freshbooks via a RESTful API? Its very important for us to have full control over our checkout experience. No third-party vendor ever gets this right with their landing pages.
3. Why in the hell are so many "invoicing" services popping up, but nobody is stepping it up a notch and tapping into small business bank accounts, payroll systems, etc? Think "Mint for small businesses" or a "Quickbooks killer". What are your plans around this? You guys seem like you're just another web invoicing company.
http://community.freshbooks.com/addons
2. You do need yo send them at least once to an recurring invoice so we can grab their credit card. After that we don't need to be in the way.
3. This is the Internet. You can't be successful without a ton of competitors popping up.
3.1. SaaS is about small pieces loosely joined. Companies are building what you want in chunks. See http://thesmallbusinessweb.com
On your last point, 3.1, I feel like there's room for something more full-featured inside of one product. When I first saw Freshbooks, I was excited because it looked like you had a full featured small business accounting app, but then I was quickly disappointed because its basically the same as Blinksale.
For small business accounting, try FreshBooks + Xero.
Looks like a simple XML-RPC
/i am not related in any way to freshbooks
To do that you can create a recurring profile through the API. Start it running today (the default) and it will immediately generate the first invoice, whose invoice_id will be returned in the Recurring.create response.
Do an Invoice.get on that id. Redirect the customer's user agent to the client_view link. They can pay the invoice and authorize autobilling from there.
After that you can Recurring.update the profile at will and every subsequent invoice will automatically be racked up in their credit card without their intervention.