How FreshBooks Gained Hundreds of New Customers with a Custom, Native Shopify App and Platform Integration

First Glance

FreshBooks is one of the largest SaaS accounting software companies on the market. Founded in 2003, the company develops all-in-one invoicing and accounting software primarily for small businesses.

After being approached by Shopify to build natively integrated accounting software for the platform, FreshBooks jumped at the opportunity to be the first company to fill that need for Shopify merchants across all industries. Freshbooks enlisted the help of Sunrise Integration to execute on all technology requirements and act as their strategic advisors. 

Through a carefully planned discovery process, which included several iterations, our team delivered a robust application and scalable integration between FreshBooks and Shopify. We became an integral part of their team that provided strategic guidance to ensure they enjoy sustainable growth for the future.

The Challenge

Understanding the complexities and time demands of building and maintaining a new app, FreshBooks knew they needed a partner with a proven track record of providing powerful data integration and software development solutions. 

Given our breadth of experience and expertise, Sunrise Integration was the perfect choice to build a solution that would enable FreshBooks to:

• grow their platform partnerships

• increase leads and user acquisition

• optimize customer retention and; 

• stay ahead of the competition

Beyond the application itself, FreshBooks also required a foolproof way to successfully “absorb” the product when their teams were ready. Through our Build-Operate-Transfer model, we handed the solution off to FreshBooks to ensure that their team could use and maintain it without our assistance.

The Solution

Using powerful technologies like Node.js, MySQL and Google Cloud, our team built a solution that allows small businesses to integrate order information between Shopify and FreshBooks, merge/map Shopify data and much more. 

In order to deliver a superior final product, we ensured the process for this project was a hybrid of agile sprint-based development and waterfall milestone-based collaboration. Our team was able to work iteratively on the product engineering aspect while breaking up a project into linear phases in order to meet key milestones. 

But the work wasn’t done just because the solution was built. We ensured the app and integration would work flawlessly by putting them through a rigorous QA and integration testing process, which required a full test installation of the application. 

Furthermore, we ensured the smooth handoff of the solution to FreshBooks by embedding their in-house integrations developer into our team. Through this partial merger of teams, FreshBooks will benefit from the proper knowledge transfer, training and handover of the application’s codebase.

The Outcome

The Sunrise Integration team worked diligently to deliver top-tier software products and client service.

On the first day of the launch, the FreshBooks’ app was featured in the Shopify App Store. And that’s not all–one month after launch, 437 Shopify stores downloaded the FreshBooks application and the number continues to grow at a rapid rate. These impressive results demonstrated that the goal of being the first provider of accounting software to Shopify merchants was wholly justified.

We helped scale their app on Google Cloud when it was featured by Shopify App Store and provided support where needed.

Throughout the project, we tested and contributed to their software development kit (SDK). FreshBooks’ SDK serves as a code-based toolkit that they can give to any partner in the future to integrate with their platform. In doing this, we contributed to their long-term product roadmap and went above and beyond for them to create a stronger, more fruitful long-term relationship.

The FreshBooks team appreciated our level of communication and transparency throughout the entire project as feedback and fixes to roadblocks were addressed quickly and efficiently.

Looking to the Future

FreshBooks’ team enjoyed working with us so much that we’re providing ongoing consultation around e-commerce product strategy. We’re proud to be their long-term partner who offers proactive thought leadership in identifying SaaS integration opportunities as well as develops those integrations.