It’s been about a month since the last major news from Cashboard HQ.

Have you missed us?

Fear not, we’ve been working on a slew of updates and improvements to Cashboard. This time we’ve targeted estimates for improvement.

Here’s a quick overview of the changes:

• Estimate details and items have been combined in a “worksheet” view, like invoices
• Estimates are now identified by assigned ID (like invoices)
• Tax your estimates
• New estimate item types
  • Tasks (for hourly items like before)
  • Products (for physical goods)
  • Generic (flexible items for anything you can imagine!)
• Create an invoice directly from an estimate

Estimate details

We’ve transformed the estimate details and items screens into a worksheet view, just like we did with invoices awhile back.

Of course, we weren’t satisfied to rest on our design laurels. You’ll notice this view is slightly different than before.

We’ve modified editing details to happen in a small dialog box which ensures you’ve saved your changes before returning to working with estimate items. A small, but very important workflow change which amounts to a lot of saved time.

New item types

Cashboard originally was released to accommodate one method of estimating projects – by the hour.

While this is definitely helpful for a range of industries, it wasn’t good enough for everyone.

Keeping that in mind, we’ve modified Cashboard to work for any type of estimate you can dream up. Hourly items still remain as Tasks, while we’ve added two new item types: Products and Generic items.

Products are great for materials you might be purchasing for a project. This could be anything from server hardware to lumber.

Generic items are a little more interesting, offering you the ability to estimate any type of work you might imagine. Perhaps you’re a copywriter? You can now estimate in “words”, “paragraphs”, or “pages” as shown here.

Template updates

This new functionality wouldn’t be complete without some modifications to the default estimate template.

Unlike before, customers who don’t utilize Cashboard’s high and low estimate numbers won’t see anything out of the ordinary on their estimate documents.

We’ve also updated the Cashboard liquid variable reference documentation.

Still not done…

All of these changes go towards making Cashboard the most flexible and easy to use project quoting solution on the market.

Still, be on the lookout for a few minor things like a streamlined way to accept deposits and estimate search.

If you don’t frequent our Cashboard Forum you’ve probably missed a couple interesting discussions we’re having.

• The future of Cashboard Estimates
• Possible user interface changes

Jump in and help steer the direction of the product!

A little over two months ago all paying customers were asked to participate in a Cashboard survey.

When we asked what was missing in the application the response was overwhelmingly biased towards search and reporting.

Today, those requests have been answered.

Dashboard Search

Right off the bat you’ll notice the Dashboard screen has changed significantly. Overdue Invoices and Projects to Invoice have moved to their own Dashboard screen, replaced with a higher level look at your Cashboard account.

Quick search is provided to access all items within Cashboard. No more clicking around to find what you need.

Simply and effectively search for:

• Companies & People
• Invoices
• Payments
• Projects
• Timesheets

Most of these searches can easily be downloaded to a CSV file, for exporting to MS Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or other applications.

Dashboard Quick Reports

The most stunning of the updates is sure to be our Dashboard Quick Reports.

These three reports give you a deep insight into your Cashboard account and provide you the opportunity to drill down into important information you need to operate your business.

Invoices vs Payments

Quickly see how much you’ve invoiced for and how much you’ve been paid over the course of time.

Clicking a bullet point on the graph will take you to a summary for invoices or payments for the time period specified in the report.

Project Time Spent in Hours

Keep an eye on what’s taking the majority of your company’s time.

The pie is divided into projects. Click a slice to see timesheet entries for a particular project in the date range given for the report.

Activity in Hours

See what you and your employees are up to with this report. We’ve given you the ablility to turn lines on and off for each person within Cashboard, and drill down into all of their timesheet entries for a particular day by clicking on a bullet point on the graph.

Estimates vs Actual Bars

For those of you who like to work with estimates, you’ll notice that your project tasks now have tiny indicator bars. These bars allow you to scan your tasks quickly and see what’s on or over budget. Customers who don’t use Cashboard’s estimate functions won’t see anything at all.

Clicking on the Billable number will show you all time entries logged for a particular task.

Money In Reports

Less glamorous but just as useful, we’ve moved three reports to the Money In section of Cashboard:

• Account Balances
• Company Cash Stats
• Tax Summary

WIth all of these tools you should be able to slice and dice the information inside your Cashboard account with ease. We hope you enjoy them!

It’s been a long time coming, and many of you have requested it. Today the second part of our reporting features go live. Invoice search has touched down.

We’ve opened up search for invoices so you can pull many different reports based on the information you need access to.

You can now search invoices by

• Client
• Invoice Date Range
• Due Date Range
• Payment Status
• Sent Status

Of course all of this information is great, but wouldn’t be as helpful if you couldn’t download it.

Searches can be downloaded as a CSV / Excel compatible spreadsheet so you can ship it off to your accountant, import it to another service, or perhaps back it up for your own personal needs.

Keep your eyes peeled to this blog, as more searching and reporting features will be arriving shortly.

If you were watching the twitter development feed you’d have noticed Build 1000 just went live.

This glorious new version of Cashboard allows you to have your clients auto-login when clicking a URL from an estimate or invoice notification. We believe this lessens the barrier to getting you paid, especially when accepting payments online.

In the interest of security, these URLs are unique, secret, and auto-expire after 14 days.

The default email templates have been changed to use this new feature, but if you’ve edited your email templates, you’ll need to add it manually.

Here’s how for ‘email_estimate_notice’...Replace the line with ‘estimate.client_url’ with the following…

{{ estimate.client_url | make_autologin: contact }}

...And similarly in ‘email_invoice_notice’...

{{ invoice.client_url | make_autologin: contact }}

Of course, if you’d rather not have your clients login just use the old method without the ‘make_autologin’ filter.

Enjoy!

I took a few days this week to knock out the most requested odds and ends for invoicing.

Here’s what’s changed.

Smart defaults for invoices

This is something major you all should love.

I’m a huge preference hater as many of you know who’ve communicated with me via support emails. You might have even asked for a way to set your default billing term to 30 days, or perhaps you’d like to include time entries on every invoice created. Luckilly, now you can.

Invoices created within Cashboard now default to the settings used for the last invoice created. In English, this means if your last invoice’s due date was 30 days from its invoice date, your next one will be as well (and so on).

Auto-send scheduled invoices

This is a great feature for predictable invoices that have standard monthly rates.

Before now you’d have to login in order to send an invoice created from a schedule. A simple checkbox has been added for all invoice schedules that will allow you to have the system auto-send any invoice created.

Keep in mind the invoice will automatically go to all people inside the client company which the invoice belongs to, and no time entries will be imported to the new invoice.

Automatic late fees

Another highly requested feature touches down. You can now specify a percentage that gets applied every N days your invoice is past due.

Late fees are applied to your invoices automatically. There is nothing for you to do, unless you’ve modified your HTML invoice template.

If you have modified your invoice template, please either revert your template to the default, or add this snippet of code near the bottom of ‘html_invoice’.

{% if invoice.late_cost > 0 %}
  <tr class="summary">
    <td class="first numeric" colspan="4">
      <b>Late Fee</b> - {{ invoice.late_percentage }}% every {{ invoice.late_period_in_days }} days past due
    </td>
    <td class="numeric money_gain last">{{ invoice.late_cost | format_money }}</td>
  </tr>
{% endif %}

New liquid variables

New variables have also been added which respect the late fee.
For a complete reference please see this page.

- seth

Finally, Cashboard goes fully brandable.

Customize your emails

First off, we’ve given all paying accounts the ability to customize all outgoing emails the system sends. We’re using liquid templates to accomplish this, just like the HTML estimates and invoices. For now, you may only send text emails.

Everything in the UI is color scheme friendly.

Designers, now you can finally quit bugging me about the blue buttons… Customize the entire UI just how you like it.

We’ve even set up 10 preset color themes for the non-designers in the crowd, and given free accounts the ability to customize their scheme.

Because of these changes, we’ve removed IE 6 from our list of recommended browsers.

If you’re using IE 6, please upgrade to Firefox, Safari, or IE 7.

Build 940 just went live on the server. Unless you were watching the twitter Cashboard feed you might have missed some small, but good stuff.

Here’s a rundown

• Close / Activate project buttons have been moved from the details page to the right-hand side of all project pages
• Sped up saving time entries.
  This was getting a little slow, and the performance has more than doubled.
• Added a ‘was sent to client’ checkbox for estimates, like invoices.
  This allows you to manually mark estimates sent and have them available to your clients online.
• Fixed sorting on the Accounting Ledger for people who use date formats other than mm-dd-yyyy

Only a few small changes…But as you all have seen by now, paying attention to these tiny details is what makes Cashboard great.

Enjoy!

A small update this weekend.

You’ll notice a new preference has been added to the Account Settings screen. This allows you to set the default “billable” status of all time entries created within Cashboard, and with the time entry widgets.

Completed Tasks

Another minor improvement was also pushed. Fans of the project page will like this one. No more having to edit a task to mark it complete. Click the “Complete” checkbox in your task row, and Cashboard will take care of it for you.

There have been a myriad of Invoice feature requests and questions since launching Cashboard. This evening we’ve pushed a design overhaul which takes care of the major issues people have had up until now.

Here’s a rundown of what’s changed.

Edit your invoice on one page

The biggest change you’ll notice right off the bat is that the Invoice Details screen is gone. We’ve combined it with the Items and Payments screen to form the new Invoice Worksheet, as shown below.

I can’t recall the amount of questions I’ve gotten along the lines of “how do I change my invoice number?”, or “how do I show time entries on my invoice?”. It took me awhile to figure out that most of these questions were caused by people not ever visiting the Details screen.

Longtime Cashboard customers will also notice some things have been shifted around, such as importing Basecamp time, or items from a project. These UI changes fall in line with our recent Timesheet updates, and we believe simplify the UI and reduce a lot of the clutter that was creeping into the invoice screen.

More flexible taxes

Tax per-item

Individual invoice items can now be included in tax calculations or not. Just select the “Tax?” checkbox on a per item basis.

Proper GST / PST support

We’ve also added in an additional tax, “Tax 2” which the Canadians in the audience will love. You can select if the tax is applied to the total as a sales tax, or the total plus sales tax, to properly support PST.

We’ve left this as generic as possible so you can set it up depending on what province you live in.

Custom Company Fields

Finally, a lot of you have been asking for additional fields for Companies, so that you can store things like VAT numbers, additional WWW urls, etc.

We’ve added three custom fields per-company, which can be referenced from your invoice or estimate templates.

As always, questions and comments are welcome. I hope you find the new changes as useful as we do.

Another smaller change made it into Cashboard tonight as well.

You’re now able to add negative amount items to estimates, in order to show things like discounts. Small, but useful change we believe.

This brings estimates in line with invoices, which have always supported negative amount items.

Sometimes it takes a pair of fresh eyes to point out glaring mistakes.

Such was the occasion last week when I got a puzzling email from a new customer. They were wondering why it was impossible to translate their estimates with detailed task descriptions to an invoice properly.

I was just as puzzled at the customer – until I took a critical look at the estimate to invoice workflow. The workflow graphic I came up with is to the right. You can see that estimate tasks had a title and description field, while invoice line items only had one for description.

Correcting the problem

As of this evening the problem has been corrected. Invoice line items now have title and description fields, just like estimate and project tasks.

Hopefully you’ll find the new solution as clear as we do.

Modify your existing Invoice Template

We’ve automatically transitioned all uncustomized invoice templates to use the new title field.

However, if you’ve customized your invoice template you’ll need to insert some code in order to be able to make use of the new description field.

Below is a snippet that works.

{% if item.description != empty %}
  <br/>
  <span class="info">
  {{ item.description | format_text }}
  </span>
{% endif %}

If you have any questions feel free to email support or discuss in our forums.

Just pushed a minor change which included some much-needed bug fixes.

In that update I decided to sneak something in that I’ve been forgetting to add for awhile.

A notes field has been added for

• Payments
• People
• Companies

Now you can record check numbers for payments and extra information for people and companies.

Cashboard is now a year old and has surpassed all of my expectations.

As a small company that includes myself and one part-time employee, it’s amazing to me that we’re in such a large space battling major players with far more resources than we have access to. It’s also very humbling and gives me a lot of hope for the future.

In that one year in service, Cashboard has helped small businesses collect over 26 million dollars. That’s pretty major.

For how much we’ve achieved with so little to work with, what might be possible in the future? I never imagined that this program I created for myself would grow as large as it has.

None of that would be possible without you all.

Thank you!

—Seth, Subimage LLC

Everyone who’s been asking for timesheet search your day has come.

As an admin, you may search time entries from the All-time screen. There are a number of nice new things that we rolled into this update, including:

• Search on multiple fields
• CSV export respects your search criteria.
  • This is basic ‘reporting’, but expect more to follow.
• Admins can now quickly enter time for all people in their company.
  • Users can be selected with a drop-down from the new entry form. No more switching back and forth!
• Project Time Log screen now links directly to a targeted Timesheet search, so you can quickly edit or add entries for a project.
• Make all visible entries billable or non-billable with one click of the mouse.

We’re striving constantly to make your workflow quicker, and Cashboard easier to use. Just another thing that separates us from the pack of imitators out there.