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Some Things Are Best Shoved Into a (Shoe)Box – FreshBooks, Outright and Shoeboxed

By on March 3, 2009

I’m something of a realist – we live in a digital age but for whatever reason, be it audit control, risk aversion or ease of use, we all accumulate a mountain of paper receipts over time. I like services that help move the physical world into the virtual one.

I was stoked then to hear that early this morning FreshBooks (CloudAve content here) will be rolling out integration with Shoeboxed. For those of you new to Shoeboxed, it is a nice physical/virtual world bridging solution that will convert all those pesky paper receipts directly into virtual invoices – in this case invoices within FreshBooks. users just need to collect their receipts, mail them to Shoeboxed to be scanned and data-entered, and then export them to FreshBooks for easy invoicing.

For an annual fee starting at USD100 (and with another USD10 discount as a nice integration present) Shoeboxed and FreshBooks are facilitating the crossing of one of the last banes of business, the inputting of data into business software.

But, you ask, FreshBooks is an invoicing application. What good is it having my scanned receipts in there? Well FreshBooks is already integrated with Outright (CloudAve review here) so I’d imagine seeing some three way tie up pretty soon.

For those who haven’t come across Shoeboxed before – the video below gives a demo of what they do. Note the nice learning features – man that’d save me typing “fuel” a few dozen times a month into my accounting application!

Nice work guys, now if only we can get Shoeboxed to return that big blue envelope full of crisp new banknotes to pay all those outstanding expenses… ;-)

UPDATE – As predicted, FreshBooks and Outright have entered holy matrimony making the triumvirate complete. I love it when a plan comes together! Details here.

Posted in | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Responses

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Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

More about Ben here.

6 responses to “Some Things Are Best Shoved Into a (Shoe)Box – FreshBooks, Outright and Shoeboxed”

  1. gre98
    gre98 March 3, 2009 at 6:33 am |

    This is SO cool for small businesses. Shoeboxed integrates with Freshbooks and Outright. Outright integrates with Shoeboxed and Freshbooks. Freshbooks integrates with Shoeboxed and Outright. Small businesses, you go!

  2. Ben Kepes
    Ben Kepes March 3, 2009 at 12:13 pm |

    For sure it’s a good thing. Although as Dennis points out over on AccMan, it’s a great thing for US customers – those of us in different physical and taxation jurisdiction locales are less well served by the mash up.

    Still I don’t blame them – North America is plenty big enough of a market to crack initially

  3. Alaoula
    Alaoula March 3, 2009 at 12:19 pm |

    Great idea – now I finally have a way to get rid of this giant stack of receipts and business cards.

  4. From Shoebox to Paperless, 22nd Century (?) Expense Management | CloudAve
    From Shoebox to Paperless, 22nd Century (?) Expense Management | CloudAve March 4, 2009 at 2:58 am |

    [..] And it gets better: yesterday Ben reported that the popular Web-based invoicing solution,FreshBooks is now integrated with ShoeBoxed.  So now you can have your paper expense receipts show up in an invoicing app directly.  Voila! [..]

  5. Finding a Babel Fish for Data | CloudAve
    Finding a Babel Fish for Data | CloudAve March 16, 2009 at 4:19 pm |

    [..] This relationship is depicted in the following diagram from Martin’s post – rather than concentrating on integration between accounting applications, Martin sees OAccounts helping cross integration between accounting applications and the rest of the business software ecosystem. What applications are integrated with is limitless – we’ve already seen a nice piece ofworkbetween [..]

  6. Jennifer Simmons
    Jennifer Simmons March 24, 2009 at 11:53 pm |

    So let me get this straight, I am supposed to benefit (as a freelancer – that is ‘FreshBooks target audience)with having to wait 7-10 days for Shoeboxed to get my receipts, scan them and put them in so that I can get them into my FreshBooks account and invoice them to the clients (considering I bill weekly)?

    Then I am to benefit from getting all of these details into Outright who will give me what? a Profit & Loss statement that has less detail than anything I have ever seen? Or the estimated tax feature which has me actually over paying my tax calculations because of their poor estimates?

    Freshbooks is depressing me.