You may have had some trouble accessing Freckle from Europe the past 24 hours. We’re very sorry!

It looks like a major backbone internet provider, Cogent, is experiencing major outage issues.

Freckle the application is up and running just fine; our hosting company is running just fine; but the connections between you, and the hosting company, may be in tatters, if your ISP uses Cogent somewhere up the stream.

Unfortunately, Cogent’s connectivity issues are the equivalent of the Icelandic volcano: they ground a lot of people, and there’s not a lot that can be done about it. Changing our hosting provider would not even make a difference.

Our hosting provider is working with Cogent, and here is their status blog on the issue. Unfortunately (again), Cogent themselves are remaining silent, so we don’t know anything more at this point than you do.

This totally sucks. Thank you so much for your patience and classiness.

We know it’s not really a solution, per se, but if you’re scratching your time down on paper until Freckle is back up, you might enjoy using our PDF/ paper time tracker that we made for people who love printable planners. You can still download it (because our blog is not affected by the outage due to a nice coincidence).

Download PDF (260k)

Thank you so much for bearing with us!

We’ll post updates as soon as we learn anything.

Oooh. What can I do with it?

You can now create invoices for any project.

You can specify a flat rate total (per invoice) or a single hourly rate (per invoice).

You can add any tax percentage you need, and specify any currency.

You can opt to show no hours, just a total, or even attach a full report on subsequent pages.

Choose your own invoice numbering and reference information.

How do I create an invoice?

We’ve made it drop-dead simple:

Just go into any of your projects with billable hours, and click Create new invoice.

As you can see, don’t have to go dig up your last invoice and figure out when you invoiced, just to make a new one. Freckle will automatically create an invoice for you out of any hours that you haven’t yet invoiced.

You can specify a date range, of course, if that’s the way you like to roll!

Then enter your client’s contact info, your contact info, including any tax IDs or whatnot that you need to include, and customize the other settings such as price/hourly rate, tax percentage, currency, and more.

(That’s just one more way we’ve shown our commitment to eliminating the demon of up-front configuration.)

I have hours invoiced before now. What do I do?

Been invoicing your Freckle time by some other means? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!

Just go into the project in question and click the button to Mark hours invoiced outside of Freckle. Provide the end-date of your last invoice (up to and including hours logged for that day), and we’ll mark ‘em as invoiced already so you can start with a fresh slate.

Don’t stress if you accidentally enter the wrong date. You can always undo it later.

How do I get my shiny new invoice to my clients?

Right now, you have three options:

1. Send them a special, private link by email, IM, or any other medium you can think of.

2. “Print” it as a PDF and email it to ‘em as an attachment.

3. Or print it on paper, and send it along by snail mail.

These invoices look great on-screen and on paper!

Freckle Invoicing is beta.

Our brand new invoicing system isn’t done yet. We’ve tested the daylights out of it, and everything sure works on our end, but it’s still possible that you might find minor issues here and there.

If you do, let us know! Click the pink Feedback button on the left side of every Freckle page.

And we know you’re going to want it to do even more awesome stuff.

Let us know about that, too!

What do you think?

Lifehacker!

Lifehacker named us one of their Top 10 Underhyped Web Apps.

To wit:

… Freckle doesn’t require you to learn a new set of rules or input methods to track how you spend your time working for clients. If you type “Writing copy for Benderson Corp. 1h45m,” it assigns a 1-hour-and-45-minute billing for Benderson. Want to make something non-billable, but still tracked? Add an asterisk after it. Freckle offers visually appealing reports about how you’re spending time for clients, but also how you’re spending your own time, giving you the chance to assess how you’re spending your time. A plan with one account and one project is free, and any of Freckle’s other plans can be tried for 30 days free, so if you don’t find yourself addicted to its charts and graphs, you can return to your spreadsheet.

And don’t forget: you can write 1h45m, but you can also write 1.75 or 105 and Freckle will figure it out for you.

Futurezone–In German!

As you may know, Thomas and I (Amy!) live in Vienna, Austria, and so do our totally indispensable partners at abloom. ORF is the Osterreichischer Rundfunk–the (publicly-funded) Austrian Broadcasting Agency, essentially.

They did a piece on Freckle, and another time service based in Austria. It’s in German originally but this translation is pretty decent!

Dan Taylor’s Video Interview – 8 mos Ago

A while back, we did a video interview for Dan Taylor, a social media reporter who also lives in Vienna. Our interviewer was his partner Magda Pressel. And Dan clearly had a blast putting the footage together. (Just play the first few seconds, even, to see what I mean!)

freckle: time tracking rethought from Dan Taylor on Vimeo.

It’s particularly fun to look back and see where things were when we were just getting started!