News

We love Ruby on Rails over here at Cashboard. It’s what the service is written in.

We know a lot of our customers love Rails as well, so we’re proud to announce that we’re sponsoring Rails Rumble 2008 by giving away free year-long Cashboard accounts to the winners.

The competition in their own words

Spend the weekend of October 18th and 19th with us, designing, developing, and deploying the micro application you’ve been dreaming about. And in case the launch isn’t enough reward in and of itself, our kind event sponsors have offered up a bunch of really kick ass prizes that the community will help award to the best new web properties.

Crack open those source code editors and get hacking people!

You might have noticed something different about the app this evening. Namely a small “feedback” tab on the right hand side of your browser.

This isn’t a figment of your imagination. We’ve integrated with UserVoice to provide you quicker access to support. UserVoice also will allow us to track feature requests in a more organized fashion than we did on the Cashboard forum.

The feedback widget only shows up in your interface. Your clients will not see it.

The Feature Requests area of our forum has gone the way of the dodo bird. Please use our page over at UserVoice, or the widget from within the Cashboard application to submit new ideas for the app!

You might have noticed things look a little different around here.

We’ve just rolled out new branding for Cashboard, including a refreshed widget design.

More design changes to come. Could the application see some reworkings soon as well?

This evening we launched some very oft-requested features for payments.

First up, your clients now have access to all payment receipts online via their client UI.

Of course, the design of these receipts can be fully controlled via our html and css templating features.

To round out this feature offering, we’ve given you the ability to send a link to these payments via email, just like you do with estimates and invoices.

You can even attach a PDF of the payment receipt to the email, if you’re a paid Cashboard account holder.

Those of you who’ve been watching the Cashboard Twitter feed will have seen some interesting things going on last night.

Admins can add tasks from Timesheet screens

First up, a handy UI tweak that will streamline a lot of your time tracking.

Admins can now add tasks directly from all of the Timesheet screens.

This is a great shortcut for those of you who don’t plan your tasks out ahead of time. Tasks will be added with whatever default hourly rate you’ve set for your project.

The “orange box” is dead, again.

A few of you started a minor revolt about the “orange box” that had started popping up on your pdf and print invoices / estimates.

This was a poorly thought out design change that we’ve reversed. It was originally put in place to alert customers of yours that they needed to pay a deposit online.

Since adding liquid variables for estimate deposits I’ve decided to back this change out. In its place, you’ll find the following code at the bottom of the default estimate liquid template. It’s a little more subtle.

{{ # DEPOSIT }}
{% if estimate.deposit_required == true %}

  <h2>Deposit Required</h2>
  <div class="contentPad">
    <p>
      {{ account.company.name }} has requested a deposit of {{ estimate.deposit_amount | format_money }} be paid on this estimate.
    </p>
    {% if estimate.deposit_paid == true %}
      <p>
        <em>This estimate's deposit has been received. Thank you.</em>
      </p>
    {% endif %}
  </div>
{% endif %}

Keeping it moving

Our update pace has been slow this past month, but look for things to pick up again. You’ll find a few interesting discussions going on inside the Cashboard Forum that will clue you into what’s coming soon.

- seth

The OS X time tracking widget has been updated for Leopard and can be downloaded here.

Those of you using OS X Leopard might also enjoy this workflow I’ve come across.

- seth