News, Features & Updates

More visual revisions today.

All current Cashboard customers should recognize the image to the right, the invoice overview that was present when you logged in.

It’s been evolved into something smarter…

New Overview

The duplicate tables and headers really served no purpose in the old layout. The new version saves space, and gives you the information you need to act on your outstanding invoices.

In addition, we’ve added a handy invoice total – so you know how much money is out there that needs to be collected.

As hinted at yesterday, here’s a preview of the new features that will be pushed live this evening (PST).

Refreshed design

You’ll notice right off the bat that we’ve tweaked a lot of minor things to make Cashboard easier to navigate, cleaner, and nicer on the eyes.

Tabs have been integrated into the header and all possible visual noise – like duplicate headers and extra links – have been removed. Additionally, we’ve given extra control to change mostly all colors in the UI.

Added colors you can customize

• Page background
• Page text
• Headers (H1s)
• Footer link color

New task selector

The old way to select tasks for a timesheet worked, but it was far from pretty – or fast.

The new way is much quicker, provides more information, and just looks sick.

You can sort tasks in alphabetical or rank order…and the system will remember what order you like them in as long as you’re logged in.

The new selector also allows for a much better display of information. Items no longer get cutoff, so you get full descriptions for your tasks.

Additionally, you’ll notice that the giant blue forms for adding timesheet entries have been replaced with cleaner, easier to use options. We’re currently investigating similar changes for the Project and Estimate screens.

Those dual dropdowns were a major pain in the ass.

Look what I cooked up last night:

If you’ve been watching the Cashboard Twitter feed you’ll have seen a minor flurry of activity over the past few days.

I’ve been busy cleaning up some of the dust and cobwebs over the application. Here’s a visual walkthrough for those of you who can’t understand some of the cryptic code check-in messages…

Light colored headers

The designers out there who favor a lighter color scheme will appreciate this one.

The curved tabs used to show some minor pixelation when used with a light background. As you can see, this has been fixed.

Web geek technical info: We’re using the browser’s native support for curved items – so those of you using Firefox and Safari will get the curved tabs – while the small percentage of you on IE will get square tabs.

Invoice reminders

You’ve always been able to send reminders from Cashboard for overdue invoices, but some people were a little confused with the process.

This change makes it extremely obvious how to send one.

(No these aren’t automated…yet.)

Manually sending invoices

Those of you who send invoices via the postal service will love this next change.

You now have the capability to mark invoices manually sent from the Invoice Details screen.

Moving forward

We’re pushing forward with a bunch of new things – as always, watch this space for the latest…

Quick update here, last night we tweaked the Cashboard server to run a lot faster. You should notice a significant improvement in speed during peak times, which usually are 6am-12am PST.

Enjoy!

We’ve recently caught the Twitter bug.

For those of you that don’t know what Twitter is, it lets you micro-blog, or publish many frequent micro updates. We’re using it to track the development of Cashboard.

Any time we commit something to our source code repository, or publish a change live to the site it will be reflected on the Cashboard Twitter page.

The messages might seem cryptic or super geeky at times – but it will give you a picture into exactly what we’re up to, down to the minute.

All of you info-junkies can follow the latest developer comments if you have a twitter account, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

It’s been awhile hasn’t it? Did you miss us?

We aren’t dead – just smashing bugs, cleaning up the application, and beefing up our automated testing. The first results of this effort come to fruition today with a Scheduled Invoice tweak.

Scheduled Invoices get some love…

It seems as if the old UI for creating invoice schedules had a very major bug that some of you were using as a feature.

Old

WIth the old UI, you could create a “one time” scheduled invoice if you set the interval box (the one with 14 in it) to 0. This was wrecking our automated creation script.

New

Instead of banning the feature, the new UI has been adapted to give you what you want. You can now easily create one time scheduled invoices. Select a date for the invoice to be created on, and the last radio button. The schedule will create an invoice on the proper date, then delete itself.

Nice and tidy, no?