Improving Life for Both our Clients & Virtual Assistants

Even though many businesses claim they are unique, we do indeed do things a little differently here at Freedom Makers. That has sometimes made it hard to find software “off the shelf” that meets our needs. 

One such instance is how we handle clients purchasing hours. Our journey led us to Twinbee that improves operations for both our clients and our virtual assistants. Twinbee is our new, in house time tracking, billing, and payment system.

Background 

Many virtual assistant agencies offer a flat block of hours each month, say 10, 20, 30, etc. Thus clients pay a flat rate and the agency has smoother revenue flows. The caveat is that those hours are “use or lose”, meaning business owners could be paying more than they are getting each month. Whether the virtual assistant receives pay for the entire block or solely for the hours they work, we do not know. 

Because one of our guiding principles is Freedom, we do not charge in blocks nor do we have a minimum hour requirement. Clients can choose how much they want their Freedom Maker to work each pay period. Clients do prepay so their virtual assistant stays within their budget. Also, the hours never expire. 

How We Were Doing It

We built our own tools to manage the workflow of tracking prepaid hours and hours worked.

• We built a database in Knack to track what hours clients purchased, their Freedom Maker worked, and the remaining balance of prepaid hours. We manually entered the information but it was an improvement from the Excel spreadsheet with which we started.
• We built forms in JotForm for clients to purchase hours based on their hourly rate.

Try as we might, we could not find a software that would:

1. Allow time tracking for the Freedom Maker
2. Decrement that time from the client’s prepaid balance
3. Allow us to add to the balance without starting a whole new project
4. Be affordable to us

The Journey to Twinbee

In March 2019, we learned about a software called 

Chargebee that lets companies offer subscription payments. As far as payment processing went, it seemed like exactly what we were looking for: allowing clients to flexibly add hours in ways that worked for them and keeping track of the prepaid balance. 

We simply needed to find a time tracking system to feed into Chargebee.

Ruh Roh.

We had reached a point that was beyond our technical expertise. Every quarter, I would set implementing Chargebee as one of my goals. The team would basically roll their eyes at me because I never made any progress.

Finally in early 2020, I reached out to a Freedom Maker in a vain hope that she could help. I knew she was studying software engineering and I knew she was very busy. I assumed setting up a DIY software for someone technically incompetent would be too easy for her. 

Serendipity!

It turns out she was looking for a capstone project to complete her degree and this project was not too easy, particularly because she and her classmate were going to build out an entire user interface, complete with a time tracking system that would integrate with Chargebee. 

Thus in May 2020, we embarked on this project. I did not know what to expect and was completely blown away by their product. Indeed, they won “best capstone” in their class! They ended up naming it Twinbee.

We then hired them throughout the summer to build out more features. 

End Results

I am very happy with what we have for numerous reasons:

• It better serves our clients. 
• They now have real time updates on where they are at with their balance of hours and what their virtual assistant is working on. 
• It is easier for them to purchase more hours or set up a subscription.
• It better serves our Freedom Makers
• It is easier for them to track their time worked. 
• They have clearer insights into the available balance of hours. 
• It better serves the company
• It is easier for us to pay the Freedom Makers
• We have more insight and real time updates into how the company is doing
• It is less work for us to manage and sets us up to scale
• We were able to hire a Freedom Maker to build this--how cool is that?

Another guiding principle at Freedom Makers is Strive for Excellence. We believe you can never achieve excellence because once you reach that level, it is now your standard. Thus one can only ever seek improvement. We are always striving for the best way to serve our clients and our virtual assistants.