It's a tough category with some other excellent web applications, including ones we even use ourselves like Zendesk.

We'd love it if all our users could support us by voting in the awards, and thank you to those of you who already have. We appreciate it.

We'll be publishing the results once we've had a chance to crunch the numbers, but in the meantime here are the winners of the prize draw.

Drum roll please...

• Paul Horsfall won an iPod Touch
• James Grant  won a Nintendo Wii
• Henk van Tenk Becking won an iPod Shuffle

Well done guys!

We recently introduced a new and improved customer support service, which is enabling us to better respond to customer support requests, and even integrates with Get Satisfaction.

So, far be it for us to disagree with Mick Jagger, but we're trying our level best to make sure you can always "get what you want".

If you think we're doing a good job, then we've got a little favour to ask. FreeAgent has entered into the 2009 Software Satisfaction Awards under the categories:

• Small Business Accounting Software
• Web-Hosted Accounting Software
• Best Newcomer

and we would be eternally grateful if you could take a moment to fill in the survey.

Annual Subscriptions

Due to popular demand, we've now introduced the option of paying annually for your FreeAgent subscription, with the juicy worm of getting 12 months subscription for the price of 10. Your new annual subscription will take off from the next payment due date so you won't lose out on the current month.

To change your subscription type, click My Account and then change your payment method.

Recurring Invoices Overhaul

We're going to make some changes to the way invoices and emails are handled in coming releases, which will see us tackle some oft-requested features like email templates and late payment reminders.

To kick things off, we're reworking recurring invoices.

To create a recurring invoice you now first create a Recurring Invoice Profile which defines the invoice details, template and amount as well as when the individual invoices will be created. This in turn generates the invoices, and optionally emails them out automatically.

Separating the recurring profiles from the invoices themselves means it's now a lot easier to go back and edit individual invoices or the profile itself.

Also this week

• You can now create a VAT (or sales tax) only invoice by creating an invoice item of type VAT and having this as the only item on an Invoice.
• You can now create biweekly recurring invoices.
• We've updated the API with the ability to list bank account data

All the best,
Roan & The Team at FreeAgent Central.

We've been big fans of "Customer Support Community" service Get Satisfaction since we started using it last year. It's been criticised for blurring the boundaries between official customer support and customer discussion, but for companies who do opt-in, it's an excellent opportunity to create a community of users openly and transparently discussing their product.

It's allowed us to have some great discussions on what's right, what's wrong and what people would like to see from FreeAgent in the future.

The Catch

There is one minor catch with Get Satisfaction and that's the amount of, how can I delicately put this, "noise". One of its appealing qualities is the ability for anybody to chip in to a conversation, which often means that another FreeAgent user or partner is able to answer a question or help with a problem. This is brilliant, but there are occasions when the volume of discussion isn't conducive to swift and decisive customer support. Despite our commitment to excellent customer satisfaction there are occasions when topics slip through the cracks or we don't respond as quickly as we should.

Get Satisfaction has released a number of tools that help companies manage outstanding issues and topics, but it still excels as a forum for sharing ideas and thoughts, rather than one-to-one resolution of a specific, possibly sensitive, problem.

The Tao of customer support

To fill that gap, we recently adopted ZenDesk as our official helpdesk, and any emails sent to support@freeagentcentral.com automatically raise tickets there. This allows us to do a couple of things that weren't possible with just Get Satisfaction:

• Assign the ticket to a member of the team so the customer has a single official point of contact
• Deal with potentially private financial details in an appropriate manner away from a public forum
• Track the status of the ticket through to resolution so the customer knows exactly what's going on
• Monitor and produce reports on our response time to customer issues

The Missing Link

So, we have two excellent systems working in parallel, with one obvious flaw: many problems are initially raised on Get Satisfaction that should really be dealt with privately in ZenDesk.

This hasn't been a major issue for us thus far, but it does create an overhead when we have to tell people to email support where we can deal with their problem better.

The great news is that ZenDesk and Get Satisfaction have been working on an integration that will allow a seamless transfer of Get Satisfaction topics into ZenDesk tickets. It's currently only in Beta but we've been trying it out for the last few days and it works great!

The integration allows us to take a topic raised in Get Satisfaction and escalate this into ZenDesk where it is assigned to a member of the team, who can then respond privately to the user, improving dedicated one-to-one customer service when it's needed.

You can optionally repost all updates back to Get Satisfaction but we've decided against this, although being able to synchronise the status of a problem between the two systems is a nice touch that benefits other users tracking the problem on Get Satisfaction.

We're already seeing the benefit of this, and we think it will improve our customer support a lot so well done to the Get Satisfaction and ZenDesk teams.

Exceptional customer satisfaction has always been at the heart of what we try to achieve with FreeAgent. Providing kick-ass software is one thing, but magical things happen when we drive product development based on what you guys are saying, and we've tried to do that on a number of fronts. We might not get it right every time, but we are committed to the best possible service we can deliver.

Get Satisfaction has been a fantastic way to openly and transparently engage with FreeAgent users and find out just what they (in no uncertain terms!) want from the application. We also recently introduced an improved formal customer support service, by using the excellent Zendesk, which helps us track customer support queries and respond to these better. Coupled with the chatter on Twitter and we think we've got our bases pretty well covered when it comes to keeping our users a happy bunch.

This sort of multi-pronged communication represents the real value that Software as a Service companies can offer, and what truly sets us apart from our desktop-based counterparts.

So to cement our dedication to excellent customer service. FreeAgent has entered into the 2009 Software Satisfaction Awards in the Accounting & Finance section under the categories:

• Small Business Accounting Software
• Web-Hosted Accounting Software
• Best Newcomer

You'll probably notice that we're up against some behemouths of the accounting world like Sage, but the great thing about these awards is they count on the relative satisfaction of users and not simply brute numbers so we're confident of faring well against the establishment.

If you're a FreeAgent user, and fancy sticking it to the man, please do take a moment to fill in the short survey. It doesn't take long and would mean a great deal to us.

Thank you for your ongoing support.

Those of you that like to track payments to suppliers will be pleased to know we've made a number of improvements to the way Bills are handled.

On the main Bills screen you will now see a reworked table of Bills which can be filtered by status and date.

• You can now Pay a Bill directly from the edit Bill screen. This will create a manual bank transaction of the same value marked as a Bill Payment.
• Bill Type has been renamed Category in line with other parts of the application.
• General Bills performance has been improved.

On the main Bills screen you will now see a reworked table of Bills which can be filtered by status and date.

Bank Transactions

It is now possible to delete bank transactions. From the bank transaction explanation screen simply select Delete this Transaction to remove it from your statement view. If the bank transaction cannot be deleted (because you've already partially explained it) the delete button will appear greyed out and when you click it you'll see a pop up explaining the reason.

We'll be rolling out this delete and explain functionality across the app so it's clearer when and why things can be deleted or not.

If you have already explained a transaction you will first have to remove the explanation, by clicking on the Remove this Explanation button, before you can delete it.

Payroll

When setting up (or revising) Payroll you now enter Monthly gross values as opposed to Annual.

It's also easier to set up and revise your Payroll, and you can easily delete an entire Payroll if you like, whereas previously you would have to delete the individual payslips.

Other updates

Also worth mentioning in this release:

• You can now edit a Contact directly from the Contact Cards on main Contacts screen. Just click the helpfully labelled edit button.
• If you import a batch of contacts, it's now possible to undo that last import. This will only work for newly imported contacts.
• Currency Exchange Loss and Currency Exchange Gain added as new categories
• You can now create an invoice by adding all the estimate items into a single invoice item
• Added support for Romanian Lei (universal)
• Added support for Singapore Dollar (universal)
• Fixed an issue with the Invoices worksheet in the Excel export file
• Fixed an issue with our handling of partnership drawings and capital accounts
• Fixed an issue with handling of Pre-startup Capital Purchases
• Ongoing improvements to the user interface that you may or may not notice.

As part of the offer we were giving away 3 Free lifetime accounts for new signups and 3 free lifetime accounts for existing customers who referred others in April.

And I'm pleased to announce the winners are..(drum roll please)...

New Sign ups

The 3 winners are:

• Jeremy Wilkins
• Rob Bevan
• Conway Accounting Services

Existing customers

The 3 winners of the referral raffle are:

• Marie Poulin
• LJR Software Ltd
• Kyomedia Ltd

Congratulations to all the winners whose accounts have now all been moved onto free lifetime accounts!

As former freelancers ourselves we know how isolating it often feels working on your own, and how reassuring it can be to understand how other freelancers are doing. The results of this survey should shine light on how freelancers are being affected by the credit crunch and what measures they are taking to safeguard their businesses.

The survey should only take a few minutes to complete, and there are some great prizes to be won for entrants, so please fill it in.

Once we've collated and analysed the results, we'll produce a report which will published here for everybody to see free-of-charge.

Maintaining a continuous service for our users is our number one priority, so we're very sorry for this short period of downtime. Our ongoing aim is to provide 100% uptime all month, every month, and we have an excellent track record in this, but occasionally problems do arise.

We freely publish our uptime reports online so you can see how we're doing:

http://www.freeagentcentral.com/uptime
(Note: the 3h 46m of downtime in August 2008 was due to a physical server move to a new data centre).

Thanks for your ongoing support,
Olly

James Adam, one of our users, has just released a Mac-based Open Source time-tracking widget for FreeAgent.

In his own words:

It's fairly simple, functionality, but covers everything I need. Once you fill in your FreeAgent details, it will load your projects, and choosing a project will load the available tasks for that project. Hit the big middle button to start/pause timing, and then clicking "Post" will post that time to your account. I've added a few neat little tricks - try double-clicking the time and typing "1h30", for example.

It's not hugely sophisticated - you can't manage your existing timesheets, or add a timesheet for another day - but clicking the 'timeslips' text will take you straight to your timesheets on the site should you need that.

We already integrate with Timepost but it's great to see a user-contributed free time-tracker now available for FreeAgent. You can provide feedback or report any issues at Github Issues.

Great work James!