News

We pushed a small update last night that streamlines the template editing process. It’s a small change, but a huge workflow improvement.

If you’ve done any heavy customizing of your templates, you should appreciate the new Save & Preview button. It saves the template you’re currently working on and previews it at the same time.

Cashboard customers that have accountants, rejoice! We’ve officially launched our QuickBooks integration feature.

You can now export Contacts, Invoices, Payments, and Expenses into an IIF file. This should make it easy come tax time, when some of you have been demanding information in Intuit’s format.

You can download all information in one go, from the Settings screen, or a subset of that information from Invoices, Payments, Expenses, or Contacts screens. Just look for the Export As… link.

We’ve tested this as much as we can internally, so please let us know if we need to modify the export files in any way.

Special tip

On the Invoices, Payments, and Expenses screens you can use our Advanced Search tool to restrict the date range of information exported.

A handfull of our customers have been using our API to sync data with outside services for awhile, so we figured it was well time to take off the “beta” tag from the API.

The official announcement can be found in our forum.

Long time Cashboard customers might have noticed that we soft-launched a new quick search feature last week.

Using this new search it’s easy to find items within Cashboard, especially if you have a lot of data.

For instance, try searching on a client’s name. The results will include a link to their account, along with all items that belong to them.

You can also enter in ID numbers for invoices, estimates, and payments to find those easily – or perhaps try entering some text from one of your expense descriptions.

This is a really quick way to navigate if you don’t feel like drilling down through lists inside the program.

Autocomplete

For even quicker navigation, there’s also an autocomplete feature akin to what Google does on their search homepage.

You’ll notice as you type a few characters, the magnifying glass icon will start to spin – and a list of results will appear in a drop-down menu. These are the top 5 search hits for your query. If you see what you’re looking for you can instantly go to any of these items by using your keyboard to select one (arrow keys + enter) – or by clicking on them.

If you don’t see what you’re looking for, simply hit the enter key or click the search button to perform a full search. Simple, and effective.

Advanced Search / Filtering

Of course, we still support the more advanced form of searching you’ve grown accustomed to. Click the drop-down button to the right of the magnifying glass to reveal those options.

From what I’ve seen so far, the feature is certainly getting a lot of use. I hope you all are enjoying it.

Boy, what a day.

For those of you blissfully unaware, today our co-location facility had some major problems with an automatic transfer switch and we were down for about 12 hours.

This “ATS” is a device that switches power from a primary source to a backup source in the event of a power failure. To summarize, basically the guys at colo4 fucked up in a major way and “fused” this ATS by overloading it. (Perhaps melted is a better word?)

We host our servers with Rimuhosting – which uses colo4 as one of their data centers in Dallas, Texas. All of our Cashboard servers are located there. They’ve been great to us during the 4+ years we’ve been in service as you can see by our stellar uptime record.

Unfortunately today that was not the case.

What we’re doing to make this right

I know that you depend on Cashboard to get paid, which is why I tried my best to give everyone up to the minute information on our twitter feed and through a status update email sent to all paying account holders.

We’re not going to “pass the buck” down the line. We’re going to try and make this right. Some companies would ask you to email them if you’ve been affected by the outage. To me, that’s just a slick way to mitigate their losses. Cashboard is not one of those companies.

Here’s the deal – if you all couldn’t get paid today, then neither should we. I’ve extended everyone’s billing date a day into the future. This means you won’t be charged for the downtime today. I believe that’s fair.

On top of that, we’re also looking into other options in hosting, including servers at other data centers in different locations across the country (and perhaps the UK). We’re still a very small company – but we know that accessing Cashboard is critical to your business every day.

This is not an issue we’re taking lightly.

As I mentioned in my email update – all your data is safe. No data was lost at all.

Thanks to all of our great customers for being so understanding, and having patience with me today during all of the emails and tweets I exchanged with you. You guys are awesome we really appreciate your support.

I’m going to get a drink now.

- Seth (the somewhat tired and stressed out founder of Cashboard)

This feature wasn’t highly requested, but it’s a great organizational tool that I’m sure many of you will find useful.

I’ve noticed that many our longtime customers have hundreds of people and clients inside their accounts. Over time this can definitely clutter the interface. It’s definitely no fun to have to scroll past clients you worked for years ago, just to select your newest one to invoice.

Because of this, we’ve added the ability for you to archive clients and employees.

All archived contacts are hidden from selection lists and other places in the UI where it makes sense, but there are some nuances which I’ll explain below.

Archiving Client Companies

If you archive a company, all projects and estimates will also be closed for that company. All people within that company will also be archived – but they’ll still be able to login and view invoices and pay them if they happen to have some outstanding.

Archiving Employees

Lots of customers have emailed me asking what to do with former employees. Before today my advice was usually “change their password so they can’t login”. I realize that’s not the most elegant solution.

Instead of deleting a former employee or changing their password, it’s more wise to archive them. Archiving an employee prevents them from logging in and will hide them from project and timesheet lists. You can still report on their old time entries and expenses without a problem.

Archiving and Billing

Let me make it very clear that archiving employees or clients does not affect your bill. Those metrics are still based upon employee logins and clients invoiced within an active billing period.

As always, let us know if you have any questions.

We’ve been a bit silent on the blog lately, but if you’re following our Cashboard twitter account you’ll notice we’ve been active smashing bugs and refining features lately. Yesterday we tweeted about a new feature that deserves special attention here.

We’re now alerting you about forgotten timers, and automatically closing them after 12 hours.

About 200 of you got emails yesterday, but for those of you who weren’t fortunate enough to get one here’s a sample of what to expect in your inbox if you leave a timer open.

A timer started on 02/17/2011 was left running more than 12 hours.
We don't think you meant to leave it running that long, so we've stopped it.

= TIMER DETAILS
---------------------------------------------------------------------
- Created: 09/27/2010
- Person : King Kong
- Project: Pierce & Pierce - Demo Project
- Task : Graphic Design
---------------------------------------------------------------------

= HOURS
---------------------------------------------------------------------
- Before Timer : 1:00
- Timer Running : 3,642:23
- Final Value : 3,643:23
---------------------------------------------------------------------

You can view and adjust the timer at: 
https://monkeyfood.cashboardapp.com/timesheets/show/758798

---------------------------------------------------------------------
If you need help or have questions visit our support site:
http://info.getcashboard.com/#help
OR email support at: support@getcashboard.com

Be sure to include your Cashboard account address in 
any correspondence so we can help you more quickly.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

We appreciate your business.

- The Cashboard Staff
http://www.twitter.com/cashboard

This is one step in a process of things we will be working on to make the timers more usable for you. I hope this helps the more forgetful of you to close those timers out. Any comments and concerns about this topic are always welcome.

Cashboard allows you to upload Comma Separated Value files to import data from other programs, or simply bulk load data you’ve created in a spreadsheet program.

CSV files can be created by using Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, Apple Numbers, or even a text editor.

If you’re moving from another project management or time tracking system, there’s a great chance that you can export your data as CSV files for import into Cashboard.

Only employees of your company with Cashboard Administrator access may use our import features.

Tonight I’m happy to announce support for PayPal Website Payments Pro (WPP).

PayPal WPP is a payment processing solution for US, UK, and Canadian customers that allows you to process credit cards from your customers inside of Cashboard, and accept PayPal account balance transfers.

Customers paying you online with WPP will be presented with a slick payment form, as shown below.

For more information on integrating PayPal with Cashboard see this article.

Cashboard has supported online payments with PayPal since day one, but it took us a little while to get on the instant payment notification (IPN) bandwagon.

Tonight we launched full support for PayPal IPN, including single invoice payments and full balance payments. IPN allows PayPal to contact our servers after a successful payment has been made on their site by one of your clients.

This means that your customers can pay you online via PayPal, and payment records will automatically be entered into Cashboard. No more manual entry!

To enable PayPal IPN support, see the instructions here.

We’re now looking into broader integration with PayPal in the near future, including PayPal Website Payments Pro.

UPDATE These features were launched as of 1/9/2011

We’ll be launching some new features this weekend that you all should enjoy.

One is a highly requested change, and the other is a revision to an existing feature that makes it easier to use. Both of these features work together to give you more flexibility when creating invoices for your estimates.

The great thing about handling all support inquiries and also being the lead designer of Cashboard is that it’s very easy to spot where my designs are causing confusion. This rich feedback loop allows me to see where I’ve failed in the past, and helps me refine the product to be easier to use and understand.

One such situation that kept popping up from time to time has to do with our outstanding credit system. In Cashboard you can record a payment and have it outstanding, or not applied to any invoices. Some customers that invoice their clients multiple times a month were in effect “losing” payments within the system, unaware they had money which had not been applied to any invoices.

Tonight we pushed a few changes live that will help alleviate these issues.

The first is a very noticeable alert that will show any time you view an invoice for a client who has an outstanding credit. You can apply this credit with one click of the mouse, and be on your way. You’ve always been able to do this from the Manage Payments button, but bringing to the forefront will hopefully eliminate any confusion that was remaining.

The second change has to do with the options presented to you when viewing a list of invoices. We’ve removed the redundant list of actions that we used to display, in favor of smart menus that only show when you hover over an invoice.

Usually you’re presented with two options for an invoice from this view – Send and Record Payment. Now, if your client has an outstanding credit pending you’ll only be presented with the option to apply it.

The third change is one behind the scenes – but no less important than the first two. Starting today, all invoices created from a schedule will automatically have any pending credits applied to the invoice at the time of their creation.

When taken as a whole, I believe these changes will virtually eliminate any confusion that still remains with our outstanding credit system. As always – your feedback is welcome and appreciated. Let me know how you’re getting along with the new improvements.

Customers who have been with us for any amount of time know that we sweat the details.

One area of the system that’s been bothering me lately is the send document dialog. Originally there was no way to add a contact when you went to send something – rudely we redirected you to the contacts tab instead. It really didn’t make any sense to make you jump through all of those hoops.

I’ve streamlined that process, and cleaned up the appearance of the dialog.

If I said these changes were completely altruistic I’d be stretching the truth a bit. Those with a keen eye will notice an informative link to a FAQ entry detailing a quirk of our send process which should reduce some of our support load.

Regardless – I hope you find the minor changes as useful as I do.

A few weeks back it was brought to my attention there was a small glitch on our invoice edit screen. This glitch allowed you to edit the quantity of items created from time entries – and the fee of items created from expenses – instead of using the calculated sum of those items.

The problem was, we were forcing these numbers back to their original values after a save. In essence we were destroying your perceived changes. Quite rude.

At this point we had two choices

• Don’t allow editing of the box at all
• Fully support “fudging” the numbers

Coming to this crossroads, I was reminded of a very well written book on user interface design I read many years ago. In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper writes:

Human users prefer systems that let them fudge things a little. They want to be able to bump the pinball machine just a little bit – not enough to tilt the game, but enough to have some positive influence on the outcome. This fudgability is what makes our manual systems work so much better – albeit slower – than our computerized ones.

Fudging the numbers

Sometimes it makes sense to edit these numbers on your invoice. Maybe you want a nice round number for the hours you’re invoicing. Perhaps you want to give your client a discount, or increase the sum a little. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t matter – Cashboard now supports fudging the numbers on your invoices.

In the first item shown above, we’ve edited the quantity value to be different than the sum of the invoiced time entry. When you do this, you’ll notice the input changes it’s appearance.

This visual indicator lets you know something is a little off with the number, and allows for easy scanning when editing. Any fudged numbers will be saved when you save your document.

Keep in mind that these numbers will also be shown to your clients in detail – so you might want to disable the checkbox for Show detailed time entries or the corresponding one for expenses. We leave that decision up to you.

It’s our goal to create a flexible, human centered system to help you manage your business. We know you appreciate the effort.

Many customers have been requesting a way to see if their clients ever login to the system to view invoices that have been sent. We all know that clients sometimes don’t act as quickly as they should when you send out that invoice via email.

Instead of sending a confirmation email asking if they received it you can now see exactly when they view your invoices online with Cashboard.

Of course we didn’t just stop there – we thought about all of the information you might want to see, including when your clients…

• Login to the system
• View an invoice
• View an estimate
• Make a payment
• Make a comment on an invoice, estimate, or payment

All of this information is collected as activity that’s shown throughout the system in various places. The main view is from your Overview Activity Log, which you should already be familiar with.

We also added this information to our new contact panel for individuals.

Finally, your documents will show it in their own history panels as well.