News

You might have noticed some activity on our twitter feed last night talking about some mysterious upgrades.

Those upgrades include moving Cashboard to new, more powerful servers in anticipation of more activity. The reason for this anticipation? We’ve launched the beta of the Cashboard API.

For the non-geeks in the crowd – an API is a way for programmers to write 3rd party applications that tie into Cashboard’s data. You should start seeing more applications that allow you to get data in and out of Cashboard very soon. We’re already hearing rumors of new possible mobile apps, including a few new iPhone applications that look very promising.

Expect to read more about the API in the coming months.

If you’re a programmer interested in developing with the API please see the official Cashboard API forum.

If you’re not following our twitter feed you might have missed an important feature modification we made to the way comments are handled.

Originally when we implemented the comment collaboration feature all comments were being emailed to everyone in your client’s company. For 75% of our customers this seemed to work fine, as most of you don’t create client companies with a lot of people in them.

However, for our larger customers it seemed that the way this worked was causing a lot of problems.

Because of this we made a change to comment responses – only clients who have been sent an invoice/estimate or have commented on it will receive responses to that item.

If you have been avoiding using comments because of the original implementation you should be OK to use the feature again.

As always, please let us know if a feature isn’t working for you. I do listen to everything that comes in via email and the feature request forum, even if it might not get attention immediately.

- Seth

You might have noticed over the weekend that the display format for a few things have changed.

We released a small interface update that makes visually scanning lists a bit easier.

You’ll notice that some items are now grouped by client, instead of repeating their name multiple times. A small change, but it increases usability by a lot.

- Seth

There’s a lot of communication that goes on relating to invoices, estimates, and payments outside of Cashboard.

Most of this communication is scattered across email messages, making it hard to find. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could track all of this in one place with no hassle?

Now you can.

If you weren’t paying close attention you might have missed a subtle change with Cashboard projects this afternoon.

The project “ready” state has been removed from Cashboard. This status was highly confusing to new customers and useless to existing ones. Since it wasn’t serving anyone we’ve removed it completely.

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.