News | Newsletters | Podcasts | Chats | Opinions | RSS Feeds | This Week In Print | IT Careers | Community | Reports | Downloads | Slideshows | New Data Center
Partner Sites:App Performance | On Demand Security | Networking Solution | SOA | Value of WDS
Hannibal Smith (played suavely by George Peppard) on the A-Team said, "I love it when a plan comes together." I love it when software works together to make a job easier. The classic example, Microsoft Office, allows you to pull spreadsheet data into Word and the like. Coordinated software doesn't appear often, and almost never between companies. So say hello to Freshbooks invoicing and its new partnership with Basecamp project management and collaboration software.
Both products fall into the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) category so you can work from any Internet-connected computer with a browser. Let's put this announcement into perspective a bit.
The MarketCircle company makes Daylite3 and Billings2 (no, that's not a baseball score). I talked about Daylite3 in my newsletter about the Macintosh Surge on March 15. One company, two products, and the big news for Billings2 is integration with Daylite3. I'm not laughing at MarketCircle because few companies have made this type of connection between their products, which is why Daylite plus Billings rates some attention. But when getting two products to work together is news when both are controlled by the same corporate management, you can appreciate what was involved for Freshbooks and Basecamp to get their products connected.
Billings2 pulls contact and activity information from Daylite3 to create invoices, but realistically a project management application generates better work data for accounting. I'm guessing MarketCircle will put a few more time tracking functions inside Daylite4 to make this pair of applications dance together even better.
Basecamp appeared early on the SaaS scene in the first wave of hosted business applications. Now that distributed workforces mean cubicle farms can stretch across the country, a hosted option for project management makes sense. If your company develops software you may never have all your programmers in one place at one time, so you know the good and bad sides of distributed workforces. Unless distant employees and contractors work hard to communicate their project status and time spent, billing totals slip.
Enter Freshbooks, the earliest hosted invoicing program I know of (I hesitate to say they were first, but they may have been). But invoices only contain details provided by workers or their management, meaning error-prone coworkers will mess up your invoicing. When Accounts Receivable people can go yell at project management people for project status, most of the billable hours appear on proper invoices. But how can you personally threaten, er, cajole workers three states over?
Partner Content
Company Description
Emerson Network Power and its Liebert power and cooling technologies increase IT system flexibility and availability, while lowering the total cost of ownership.
Power and Cooling Guidelines
Learn how to optimize power and cooling in network access rooms to keep equipment operating at peak performance and proactively monitor changes.
Download this white paper
Business-Critical Continuity
Read about Sequent and how they implemented a new data center to meet current requirements while easily scaling to support projected growth.
Download this case study
Cutting Energy Costs
Reduce cooling system energy costs by 30 to 45 percent through five data center efficiency strategies.
Download this white paper