In a recent open letter posted online, FreshBooks founder Mike McDerment writes about the company’s journey to becoming the number one cloud accounting specialist for small business owners. What began in 2003 as one man’s idea to build his own invoicing solution is now a rapidly growing 90 person company with paying customers in over 120 customers. “Roughly 5 million people have used FreshBooks to send and receive, print or pay invoices,” McDerment writes. “Today, if we look at just North America alone, no one except QuickBooks Online has more online paying subscribers than FreshBooks.”
In a time when businesses have to evolve quickly to keep pace with the speed of innovation, FreshBooks has managed to come out on top. Originally built around the concept of invoicing, FreshBooks began offering expense-tracking capabilities and then introduced accounting reports with the ability to track time and send estimates to customers.
And now, in his
open letter posted earlier this week, McDerment announced the company’s latest transition: from this day forward, FreshBooks is Cloud Accounting. “We're not changing our name, we're just changing the way we describe our services,” he writes. The company is demonstrating its ability to modify its services to best suit customer needs. Evidently, customers need an accounting system; and they need it in to be delivered in the cloud.
What do you think FreshBooks’ latest shift will mean for its business platform? Will it complicate things or will it better assist SMBs in their own journeys to the cloud? Should QuickBooks Online feel threatened by its Canadian competitor?
