News

Most of you won’t care about this change, but a select few power users will find this extremely useful.

We’ve lagged behind the official Liquid Template Syntax release version a bit, so we took the time today to update our version.

What this means is that Cashboard now supports many new Liquid Template filters, such as ‘plus’, ‘minus’, and a whole host of other math operations.

We’ve also updated our Liquid Variable Reference, as we’ve renamed the ‘id’ variable to ‘number’ for invoices, estimates, and payments. No need to update your existing templates – we’ve already done that for you.

As you know, Cashboard is a great way to send email notifications of invoices, estimates, and payments to your clients. Thousands of emails get sent on a daily basis without incident from Cashboard.

Unfortunately, a small minority of our customers had been complaining of undeliverable emails because of restrictive SPF settings.

Because of this we made a small change over the weekend to the way emails are now sent to your clients.

Previously emails have been “spoofed” or “forged” from your account owner’s email address. This means we would send the email as you, directly to your clients. Some mail servers look down upon this practice and reject the email from ever being delivered.

In an attempt to make our service more reliable we’re now sending the emails from Cashboard Support, with your account owner’s email address in the “reply-to” field. This enables your customers to still reply to the email in question and directly connect with you, while providing a more reliable method of email delivery.

We understand this might not be a great solution for those of you who are looking for a “white label” solution where your customers never know about Cashboard and we are keeping that in mind while moving forward with the application and our feature set.

If you have any questions on the subject please let us know in the comments below, or feel free to contact support.

Last night we launched what must be the most requested checkbox in Cashboard history.

Many of you have been asking for a way to attach PDF files from your invoice schedule emails that get sent automatically.

That day has finally come.

Those of you paying close attention will also notice that we’ve enabled the auto-attach PDF feature for your invoice reminder emails as well.

Cashboard allows you to have your own numbering scheme for Invoices, Estimates, and Payments. We’ve tried to make the numbering scheme as configurable and flexible as possible.

Another highly requested feature has been the ability to round time entries up to a specified number of minutes.

We felt this tied in well with our latest timer update and snuck it in as an additional Christmas present for you all.

Lots of people love using our dashboard widgets to accurately track time in a stopwatch like fashion, but the majority of our customers track time within Cashboard itself.

The old method inside Cashboard required you to leave your browser open while timers ran for your entries. That’s fine for people that work on the web all day long, but it can be a hassle. What’s even worse is that if your browser crashed, or you accidentally closed your Cashboard window you’d lose the time you hadn’t saved.

Not only does Cashboard track your incoming money with invoices and payments, it can now track your outgoing expenses.

Using Cashboard’s expense tracking features, you can re-bill expenses to your clients, track payroll, and keep an eye on the financial health of your business.

We’ve removed our previous Cash Stats report in favor of a much more flexible Payroll Report.

Using this tool you can report on employee costs for time entries during any date range. The Payroll Report works by pulling time entries and multiplying them by each employee’s pay rate on a per-project basis.

Markup

In the spirit of tracking expenses and giving you a more accurate way to track your profits we’ve introduced a Markup % field for Invoice and Estimate line items.

The markup field affects any price per and flat fee you’ve entered. The original prices are only shown to you, and the “marked up” prices are shown to your clients.

We’ve totally redesigned the way you manage invoice and estimate documents.

This redesign has one goal – to simplify your workflow. It comes from many hours of usability testing we’ve conducted and is a major upgrade from what we had in place.

Today I’d like to highlight our much improved Basecamp Sync.

We originally wrote the Basecamp integration with the launch of Cashboard. The API they provided back then didn’t allow us to do some things, such as importing and exporting time entries during a project sync.

To get around this, we’ve allowed you to directly import time entries to an invoice, and sync tasks on a project. This has caused many customers mass confusion and admittedly was a pretty hackish solution. Customers believed that you should be able to sync tasks and time while running a project sync. They were right.

PostalMethods has a wonderful writeup on how to send postal mail invoices from Cashboard today.

We still plan to offer a deeper integration in the future, but this is excellent news for the time being. I’d love to hear from anyone using this solution to hear how it’s working for you.

Click here for full instructions from PostalMethods

You might have noticed something a little (or a lot) different with Cashboard when you logged in this morning.

We’ve been busy designing new features and decided to release some of the improvements now instead of waiting.

These latest improvements have everything to do with reducing the clutter, visual noise, and weight of the Cashboard interface.

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.