Freshbooks announced earlier this week that they’ve added Basecamp integration with their invoicing service. Now users of Basecamp can invoice their clients via a couple of options.
From the Freshbooks’ blog entry, we learn that they believe this will satisfy 80% of people’s needs who use both the services. Check out the screencasts in the blog to see the integration in action.
It should be noted that Freshbooks decided not to allow too much integration into their product, and wisely so.
In deciding to carry forward with these two use cases, we decided on a “just make it work†philosophy. To this end, we decided that people can only track their time in FreshBooks OR Basecamp – NOT both at the same time. We wrestled with this one and came to the conclusion that it’s a business process issue, not something we should solve by synching the data. 99% of teams will use one tool or the other – not both – to track their time.
That’s a smart move by the savvy Freshbooks team. They realized that they’re never going to make everybody happy, and this should make the majority of users happy, without making the product too muddy with extra options. If there’s one thing that can kill integrations like this is making it too difficult for users to figure out how to make it work. Freshbooks has made it as simple as they could, which will pay off for them in the long run.
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