A very brief post to let you know that we've just released the Freshbooks widget.  Freshbooks is a popular service that makes it a breeze to manage and send invoices online and now it's even easier to keep track of your invoices if you have a Geckoboard account.

The Freshbooks widget allows you to see either the number or value of invoices over a time period of your choice (today, yesterday, past 7 days, past 30 days) split out by status (paid, unpaid & draft).  The unpaid status includes all invoices with a status of disputed, sent, viewed, retry or failed.

This widget is located under a new category "Sales & Finance" where you can choose either the regular or large version.

I'm excited to announce that you can now upload almost any data you want into one of four custom data widgets.  That's right, instead of waiting for us to integrate every service you use (which we want to in the fullness of time) you can just do it yourself!  With a little scripting knowledge you can see data from any service with an API on your Geckoboard status board.  But the possibilities don't end there, you can also free up data locked inside your own databases or bespoke applications for display on your status board.

Find out more about the Geckoboard Custom Data Widgets API in the API documentation which also contains example scripts to get you started quickly.  

One Geckoboard user who has already done just that is @steveWINton (Steve Winton) who wanted a couple of social media widgets that Geckoboard does not have (Twitter follower count and Facebook fan count).  Not only did Steve go out and build them for himself, he's also made them available to all Geckoboard users (no coding required) - you can see Steve's instructions at http://j.mp/geckowidgets.

That's not all we've been up to since the last update, more highlights from the past couple of weeks include:

• Google Apps Email support
• Google Apps Calendar support
• GitHub support
• "All Projects" view of Basecamp milestones & to-dos
• A raft of bug fixes and minor enhancements
• Some changes to streamline the addition of widgets
• Titles for clocks and limited Daylight Savings support
• Bigger text boxes

We're just getting into our stride and have many more integrations and improvements being actively developed and yet more in the pipeline.  The one I'm looking forward to most in the coming few days is Foursquare widgets; location information should suit a status board well I think!

As ever, a huge thank you to all our beta testers whose patience and generosity is really driving the product forward.  If there's something you're desperate to see on your status board please drop by the Feature Request forum and let us know, or why not try plugging it into a custom data widget yourself? :)

We've had lots of suggestions for new widgets since we started the private beta a couple of weeks ago (you'll find most of them over in the Feature Requests forum of the supports site), but by far the most requested and voted for feature is the ability to add a Google Calendar widget.  Well, I'm happy to tell you that this is now available.  Starting right now you can connect to your Google Calendar and have it displayed right there, on your dashboard.  You'll find it under the "Misc" category when you add a widget.

But the good news doesn't stop there because the Google Calendar widget wasn't the only thing we released, we've squashed some bugs and thrown in a couple of enhancements including:

• Enabled some caching which means your Dashboard should load quicker
• The option to include daylight savings on your Clock widget
• Millions of pageviews in the Google Analytics now render nicely instead of trailing off the screen

That's about it for now but we're working hard away on more enhancements including a rather special new feature that I think you're going to love.  I'll have more on that later but for now I can tell you that it's going to blow your minds and it's on track to be released next week.  You'll hear about it first here, on the Geckoboard blog, so why not subscribe?

Private Beta Starting

I'm excited to announce that Geckoboard beta testing for will start next week (commencing Monday 12th July).  Those of you who have pre-registered for the beta via our home page should begin to see your invites roll out early next week.  If you haven't registered already we would still love to have you help test Geckoboard so sign up now.

We're fortunate that we've had a great response to the beta pre-registration.  As a result of the number of pre-registrations we'll be releasing invites in phases on a first-come, first-served basis.  Please don't be concerned if you don't get your invite straight away, we hope to have everyone in in the coming couple of weeks.

I'll post again when we start sending out the first invites to stay tuned.

Geckoboard Help & Support Hub Now Open

I'm happy to announce today that the Geckoboard Help and Support area is now open!  This is the central hub for user support & communication and community discussions.  You'll also be able to add support requests and monitor their progress really easily.  Right now there's not a lot of content but it's being added to all the time however, we have no intention for this to be a one-way communication channel.  In addition to the FAQs and How-Tos we need your help turn this into a vibrant and genuinely useful resource.  

You'll find a Community Help forum where you can ask and answer questions from fellow geckoboarders and a discussion area where you can contribute to discussions on all things Geckoboard and status boards in general.  Finally there's a feature request forum for you to contribute your thoughts and ideas on features and enhancements we should add.

In the next few days the first beta testers will start using Geckoboard, a new realtime status board for businesses.  In this post I'll briefly explain what a status board is and how it can benefit your business.

What is a Status Board?

A status board shows you useful information about your business in an easy to digest way.  Most business have a bunch of different functions (sales, customer service, infrastructure management, product development etc), each function has information that's useful to keep an eye on.  How close are we to our sales targets? What's our customer support backlog like?  Are our servers up?  It's all useful information and all pointers as to the overall health of your business.

The problem is that all this info is locked up in different applications making it difficult to get a handle on the overall state of play.  While someone could go off and manually pull it all together and report it, it's a time consuming process and much of the information could be out of date by the time it's all collated.  This is where a status board comes in.

The status board pulls in the information from wherever it sit, displays it in a way that's easy to read and refreshes it in a timely manner to ensure it's always up-to-date.  Whether it's only used by a few people in the organisation or displayed on a large plasma for the whole office to see there are real benefits to having easy access to key business information.  By shining a light on all aspects of your business you can begin to see where and when bottlenecks occur and spot problems before they turn into dramas.

All well and good, but up to now if you wanted a status board you would have had to build it yourself.  For many companies that's a tricky proposition, a good status board can be expensive to build, in addition much of the data is siloed in external services over which you have no control so maintenance is an overhead also.  That's why we built Geckoboard.com and in my next post I'm going to give you a guided tour and take you through some of the features of the Geckoboard status board.  In the meantime, why not pop along to geckoboard.com and register for the beta?  We'll be sending out the invites in the next few days.

What sort of information is important to your business?  Share your thoughts in the comments.

PHOTO CREDIT: Life Sciences via Flickr | Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic