News, Features & Updates

As many of you know, Cashboard was down for about an hour and a half this morning.

We’re extremely sorry for any issues this caused you. We were having some hardware problems that were getting worked through and in the rush it slipped my mind to update our twitter feed with news about the event.

If this has caused you any loss of productivity please email support and we’ll get you sorted out.

- Seth

Many of you work on the same types of projects repeatedly and have been asking for a slick way to reuse or copy items from a “standard list”. Some of our competition offers this ability, but we were never quite satisfied with the way we’ve seen it implemented.

The usual solution is to offer you a place where you can “manage” these items, then you have to go through some sort of special step to include them in your project (or invoice). To us this seems like a hacked solution based on flawed interface design principles.

We’ve taken a different approach to the problem, which we believe is much more elegant than anything else out there.

Starting today, any line item you’ve created on any Invoice is available to be re-used simply by typing its name into the title field when creating a new item. All relevant attributes will be inserted into your form after selection of an existing item. This allows you to modify different properties if you feel the need.

There is no “management” of reusable items. All items you’ve created in the past are available to be reused. We’ve also added this feature with our Estimates and Projects, so you should experience the same workflow improvements there as well.

Keyboard Input

Finally, we took the time to optimize all of the new item forms for quick keyboard entry. Once you start creating items you should be able to use your keyboard to fill out your Invoices, Estimates, or Projects without touching a mouse. Quickly tab through the fields, hit enter to add a new item. Once your new item is inserted your cursor will return to the “title” field so you can add another item.

Simple, effective, elegant – we think you’ll agree.

More for your money

We’re proud to announce our newest innovation – a DYNAMIC pricing structure made custom for your business.

Our new account plan allows for unlimited active projects and offers the best value for your software dollar.

Forget constant upgrading and downgrading. With our DYNAMIC plan you only pay for what you use, never a cent more.

I’ve had my head down working on some top secret things and didn’t notice, but we just passed Cashboard’s 2 year anniversary!

I’d like to thank all of our customers for supporting the product we believe in and work so hard on. Cashboard will continue to grow and evolve to serve your needs.

We’ve got some great things planned for this year and beyond which will make running your business a lot easier.

Have a Good Friday :)

- Seth, Subimage LLC

Professional Web Design firm Chromatic posted a very kind review of Cashboard, along with 10 other “absolutely necessary web-based tools for a freelance web designer”.

Check it out if you have a moment.

In response to inquires from service-oriented companies that bill at employee rates rather than a set rate per task we’ve launched more flexible billing options on all projects.

Cashboard now has three project billing types, including the old default. This should stop you from having to use a workaround to bill the way you’re used to.

Explanation of the new billing types

• Task rate (default)
  Invoices tasks on your project at the rate set on a per-task basis
• Employee rate
  Invoices tasks on your project at the rate set for each employee tracking time for it. When invoiced, tasks will be broken into multiple invoice line items – one per employee who tracked time on the task.
• Non-billable / internal
  All time tracked for this project is marked non-billable. These types of projects will also not show up on your dashboard under the ‘projects to invoice’ section.

We look forward to your feedback after you’ve had a chance to interact with the new project billing types. We’ve also had requests to bill projects “on a retainer” and are looking into that workflow to see if it’s viable for inclusion in this feature.

If you believe we’ve missed your billing workflow here, please let us in know in the comments section.

We’re almost through knocking out the remaining workflow issues before tackling some larger items on our to-do list. (API, Expense management)

The latest batch of workflow improvements has to do with invoices and should be very useful for you. These features will go live tonight (3/18/2009).

Auto-reminders

We’re always looking for ways to help you automate your electronic invoicing more.

Now you can set up any invoice inside Cashboard to automatically email your clients a set number of days before your invoice is due, and an interval of days after it’s past due. This feature uses a new email template (email_invoice_reminder) that you can customize for your business.

For instance, we’ve set up our invoices to mail our clients 5 days before they’re due, then every 3 days after that. The email reminder template takes into account if the invoice due soon or past due, and sends the appropriate message to our clients.

In the interest of keeping this feature as simple as possible, it will email all clients your invoice is assigned to. This means if you’ve got a company with 5 employees set as your client all five of them will get the invoice reminder.

Early payment discount

Cashboard has supported charging your clients extra if they pay their invoice late, but up until now we’ve missed the other side of things.

Today that’s been fixed as we introduce early payment discounts. Research has shown that offering your clients an incentive to pay early usually entices them to do so.

Of course with any major change there’s always new template variables. We’ve updated the reference with the latest information you’ll need.

For those of you who’ve customized your invoice templates already, you’ll need to add a bit of code to support the new feature.

This should give you access to what you need on the html_invoice template.

    {{ # EARLY DISCOUNT }}
    {% if invoice.should_apply_early_discount == true %}
      <tr class="summary">
        <td class="first numeric" colspan="4">
          <b>Early Payment Discount</b> - {{ invoice.early_discount_percentage }}% every {{ invoice.early_period_in_days }} days paid early
        </td>
        <td class="numeric money_gain last">
          {{ invoice.early_discount | format_money }}
        </td>
      </tr>
    {% endif %}

Sometimes your clients don’t pay you on time and the invoices pile up. It’s a part of life when you’re a freelancer or small business. Getting paid might be troublesome sometimes, but managing your payments and sending multiple invoices at the same time should never be.

Last night we launched a set of features that make dealing with this scenario much easier using Cashboard.

Multi-invoice statement

When any of your clients are behind on their invoice payments Cashboard automatically notices this and lets you know. If this situation arises and you try to send an invoice to your client you will be presented with a new option to send a multi-invoice statement.

This new statement provides a summary of all outstanding invoices, along with each individual invoice included. As you’ve come to expect, it’s all customizable via our templating system and you can PDF the output with one click of your mouse.

You’ll also be able to access this document from the Account Balances screen, and any invoice your client has pending.

Full balance payment

We’ve also taken the initiative to clean up the Cashboard client UI as well.

Now when logged in, your clients will be greeted with an easy to read overview of what invoices they have pending, and how much they owe you.

Those of you who’ve enabled online payments with Cashboard will also have the added benefit of being able to accept payment in full for your client’s outstanding balance.

Cashboard will handle accepting the payment and applying it to all relevant invoices, oldest first.

This enables your clients to pay a portion of their outstanding balance, or the balance in full. We even smartly deal with clients of yours that belong to multiple companies (Authorize.net only at the moment).

We’re constantly striving to improve the workflow for all of our customers. If this saves you a few minutes a month, we’ve done our job. Look forward to more things coming soon, as always.

- s

Many of you know we’re working hard on getting our API together for a public launch sometime this year.

In the meantime, some of our more resourceful customers have come up with their own way to get data in and out of the Cashboard application leveraging the standard web calls we already support.

A perfect example of this is Robby Valles’ new Windows-only tool that interfaces with Cashboard.

This handy utility allows Cashboard Administrators to create tasks, mark them complete, and log time for them! Cashboard Employee accounts may also use the utility to log time in a different fashion than our official widgets for Mac and Windows.

Click here to download the utility and try it for yourself.
Great work Robby!

Those of you who have been asking for multiple templates will be happy to hear we launched this often requested feature last night.

You may now create multiple liquid templates for your documents and switch between them at will. This feature is enabled for estimates, invoices, and payments.

To enable multiple templates

All you need to do is stick to a naming guideline for your newly created templates and you’ll be able to select them for your documents.

• Estimate template names should start with “html_estimate”
• Invoice template names should start with “html_invoice”
• Payment template names should start with “html_payment”

To select a new template after it’s been created, use the Edit Details button while viewing your estimate or invoice. Selecting an alternate template for a payment receipt may be done right from the edit screen.

Originally when we first launched our Basecamp integration we had an ‘import from basecamp’ drop-down on the New Project and New Estimate screens.

After a time, we realized that drop-down was slowing down the creation of new projects dramatically, so it was removed.

Tonight we will push a new build of Cashboard into production that reintroduces the feature in a smarter way.

The new feature only grabs your active list of projects in Basecamp when you ask it to. Clicking the Import from Basecamp button will fetch all of your projects from Basecamp, and allow you to select one to import. Polite, right?

We’ve also cleaned up the projects table a bit, removing the stupid icon indicator that showed up when a project was linked with Basecamp.

It’s been replaced with a thoughtful link that will allow you to navigate directly to your linked Basecamp project. I hope you find it as useful as we do.

Launched today is the final reorganization of the administrator overview screen for the foreseeable future.

We’ve been tweaking the screen for a few weeks, but have finally nailed a great design everyone will appreciate.

Click to see larger view

Global Search and Create

First, we’ve removed the static search options on the admin overview. We moved them to a global button accessible from anywhere in the application (in the top-right corner of your screen).

This makes finding what you need much quicker, just like the drop-down menus introduced a week or so ago.

In that same vein, we’ve also made it extremely quick to add any new item with the global Create menu.

Smarter Summaries

Instead of the huge Outstanding Invoices table with a sum at the bottom we’ve given you a summary of how much money you have outstanding. You can click the amount to view all of your outstanding invoices – just like you’re used to seeing.

We’ve also given you informative metrics on your income for the present month, last month, and the year to date. This provides you with relevant information that will help you gauge the health of your business.

You can also click any of the date range labels to view all invoices for that time period.

In that same line of thinking, we’ve provided you an overview of all hours logged within relevant time periods. Of course, you can click these time periods to view all time entries for a date range as well. (today, yesterday, this week, last week, ...) Perfect for approving or reviewing your employee’s timesheet entries at the end of a week!

Buttons

The old overview screen’s buttons were showing their age. We’ve refreshed the button menu to present you with all relevant tasks you might want to accomplish right after logging into Cashboard.

News

Finally, you’ll notice a smart sidebar item that presents you with the latest news stories from our blog. This will keep you up to date on all of the new features and updates we bring you on a constant basis.

Customers that invoice for multiple projects will love this one.

Tonight we released a build of Cashboard that will clean up your invoices dramatically.

If you invoice for multiple projects on the same invoice, you will now see your invoice items table separated by project name.

You can still sort items within their proper grouping, and our default invoice template has been modified to display items in the same manner. (Before you ask – no you can’t sort the project groupings at this time)

The old default invoice template will still work, but we recommend that you move to the new one if you’ve modified your template at all.

New liquid variables

We’ve also introduced some new liquid variables which you template hackers should find useful!

• items_ad_hoc
  (Items on an invoice that don’t belong to any project)
• items_by_project
  (Items on invoice, grouped by project they belong to)
• total_quantity
  (The total quantity for the entire invoice)
• total_quantity_time
  (Total quantity of time entries for an invoice)

We’re sick of the rain and the clouds this winter. Like you, we’re ready for spring to start!

With that in mind, tonight we’ll be introducing a new color scheme that’s brighter than most of our other offerings.

The ‘Corporate Approved’ scheme will be the default for all new Cashboard accounts, but you can always choose a new scheme – or even set your own from the Settings > Color Scheme screen.

Using our new option for invoice schedules, you can create invoices, import all outstanding billable time entries, and send them off automatically.

Customers with ongoing projects should find this extremely useful. Set up projects once, log time from our widgets – and invoices are automatically generated and sent. How simple is that?

This feature will make its way into Cashboard tonight, 12midnight, PST.

- seth