I’m a very happy FreeAgent user. I’ve been using it for just over one year now and can’t complain too much. Okay, so I’d love to be able to set the currency of bills, but that’s not a deal breaker for me right now.
I’m a freelance developer, so I’m responsible for my own accounts. Keeping your accounts up-to-date is important, but can be time consuming. One of the things that I find most annoying is that for each SaaS or advertising platform I use, I have to manually import the invoices and create a bill. It takes a few steps, so individually it’s not very complicated. The drawback is that I have to do it on four or five different sites. Find the invoice, export the PDF, return to FreeAgent, create the bill, import the PDF and set a few other details. Like I said, it’s not hard, but it’s repetitive.
As a developer, I know that anything repetitive can be automated.
My first instinct was to create a simple web application that would left me connect to FreeAgent and then import the invoices by using HTML scraping from the various pages. This, however, was going to be impossible since I use two-factor authentication on almost every site and NONE of the providers I want invoices for offer an API for that sort of thing.
My next idea was a local Windows8 application, but that suffered from the same limitations as the web app, thought it would have been possible using WebViews to get past the authentication steps.
After a little time reflecting, I was reminded of the Buffer App Chrome extensions that lets you buffer images etc. inline. This seemed like it might be adaptable. A quick bit of reading and 2 hours of experimentation and I had this working in GitHub!
The button Add to Bills is automatically inserted by my extension. It can read the row, pick up the date, download the PDF invoice automatically and upload it to my FreeAgent account. Things like the Currency still need to be manually modified, but the bulk of the work is done.
Another thirty minutes and I had Azure billing support to!
There is a lot of work to do before this Extension can be released to the Chrome Store and I’d like to add support for more accounting platforms (extending beyond FreeAgent) and billing sources, but I’m happy with this as a starting point.
If you’re a FreeAgent user who suffers from invoice importing fatigue, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Tomas McGuinness 