ReadWriteWeb

Keeping up with every tech headline is hard enough for anybody, let alone busy professionals. To help, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the week's most important tech news and insights for small- and medium-sized businesses.

Our most-read post here on ReadWriteBiz in the past week was How to Optimize Your Brand's Facebook Page for Search Engines. More than 70% of major brands don't have their Facebook page optimized enough to turn up in the first 20 search results for their company's name, according to one recent report. Fortunately, the process of making one's page more SEO-friendly is pretty straight-forward on Facebook.

FreshBooks, an online invoicing favorite among many small businesses and freelancers, rolled out an integration with PayPal Business Payments today, giving users the option to charge clients online rather than waiting for a paper check.

FreshBooks has always been great at kicking out a nice-looking PDF invoice, which can be emailed to the client or printed out and sent via snail mail. Of course, even the email option requires businesses to wait a few days for the payment to be mailed or directly deposited into their bank accounts.

Web-based invoicing service FreshBooks launched an add-on store today, allowing users to purchase extra features and integrations for their account.

The store launched with five add-ons, including a tool for using FreshBooks on Blackberrys, an automated late fee generator and integrations with Peachtree Accounting, Highrise and Constant Contact. Three of the add-ons are free, while two of them cost a few bucks per month.

Web-based invoices that give the recipient the option to pay online result in payments being made twice as fast as those that do not, according to data from Harvest, an online time-tracking and invoicing product.

Based on a sample of data containing over 250,000 paid invoices from their system, Harvest found that the invoices that included the option to pay using PayPal were paid 16 days faster than those that did not, which took an average of 32 days.

Online invoicing site FreshBooks announced today the addition of a time budgeting feature that enables freelancers and small businesses to keep better track of the time spent on a given project.

FreshBooks customers can set a time budget from the outset and then keep an eye on how well the project is staying within that budget via a simple progress bar graphic within the FreshBooks UI.

What's the best way to do one-time or recurring billing for your online business? That's an important question for the growing legion of independent service providers transitioning countless business transactions onto the web.

That which is most popular may not be the best, but it's a good place to start looking. Popular online invoicing service FreshBooks posted today two pie charts (below) quantifying the most popular services used by FreshBooks customers to bill their clients, both inside and outside the US. PayPal may be the winner in one-time billings, but not by much. In recurring billings, it's not even close to number one.

FreshBooks announced today that its popular online invoicing platform will integrate with SalesForce's cloud-based CRM portal, allowing companies to manage their billing and CRM from one interface.

Starting today, SalesForce customers can purchase a DataSynch plug-in from PERVASIVE DataSolutions to link their SalesForce customers with client data in FreshBooks.

More and more freelancers and small businesses are taking their invoicing and billing online, according to data released today by FreshBooks, a popular Web-based invoicing service.

According to the data, $1 billion changed hands across the FreshBooks platform between January and early May of this year. In 2009, by comparison, this milestone was not reached until August, which suggests that online invoicing is growing at an accelerated rate

Upon first glance we were skeptical. Generally when someone says they're launching a business directory it's an SEO play with little value to users. Nevertheless, the small business web directory is a pleasant surprise. The group is providing a variety of useful resources to help startups integrate services and scale up their internal operations.

With the end of the month rolling over this weekend it is the time when some begin preparing their monthly invoices to bill clients. Theses days there is no shortage of online tools to help with financing and invoices, so we thought we would take the opportunity to point out a few tools to help you get your weekend work done quickly and efficiently. With a plethora of services comes an equally cumbersome amount of features and options, from invoice limits, to pricing and to iPhone apps. Hopefully with this quick overview of four great services you'll be able to better choose the right one for you.