News, Features & Updates

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.