News

Launched today is the final reorganization of the administrator overview screen for the foreseeable future.

We’ve been tweaking the screen for a few weeks, but have finally nailed a great design everyone will appreciate.

Click to see larger view

Global Search and Create

First, we’ve removed the static search options on the admin overview. We moved them to a global button accessible from anywhere in the application (in the top-right corner of your screen).

This makes finding what you need much quicker, just like the drop-down menus introduced a week or so ago.

In that same vein, we’ve also made it extremely quick to add any new item with the global Create menu.

Smarter Summaries

Instead of the huge Outstanding Invoices table with a sum at the bottom we’ve given you a summary of how much money you have outstanding. You can click the amount to view all of your outstanding invoices – just like you’re used to seeing.

We’ve also given you informative metrics on your income for the present month, last month, and the year to date. This provides you with relevant information that will help you gauge the health of your business.

You can also click any of the date range labels to view all invoices for that time period.

In that same line of thinking, we’ve provided you an overview of all hours logged within relevant time periods. Of course, you can click these time periods to view all time entries for a date range as well. (today, yesterday, this week, last week, ...) Perfect for approving or reviewing your employee’s timesheet entries at the end of a week!

Buttons

The old overview screen’s buttons were showing their age. We’ve refreshed the button menu to present you with all relevant tasks you might want to accomplish right after logging into Cashboard.

News

Finally, you’ll notice a smart sidebar item that presents you with the latest news stories from our blog. This will keep you up to date on all of the new features and updates we bring you on a constant basis.

Customers that invoice for multiple projects will love this one.

Tonight we released a build of Cashboard that will clean up your invoices dramatically.

If you invoice for multiple projects on the same invoice, you will now see your invoice items table separated by project name.

You can still sort items within their proper grouping, and our default invoice template has been modified to display items in the same manner. (Before you ask – no you can’t sort the project groupings at this time)

The old default invoice template will still work, but we recommend that you move to the new one if you’ve modified your template at all.

New liquid variables

We’ve also introduced some new liquid variables which you template hackers should find useful!

• items_ad_hoc
  (Items on an invoice that don’t belong to any project)
• items_by_project
  (Items on invoice, grouped by project they belong to)
• total_quantity
  (The total quantity for the entire invoice)
• total_quantity_time
  (Total quantity of time entries for an invoice)

We’re sick of the rain and the clouds this winter. Like you, we’re ready for spring to start!

With that in mind, tonight we’ll be introducing a new color scheme that’s brighter than most of our other offerings.

The ‘Corporate Approved’ scheme will be the default for all new Cashboard accounts, but you can always choose a new scheme – or even set your own from the Settings > Color Scheme screen.

Using our new option for invoice schedules, you can create invoices, import all outstanding billable time entries, and send them off automatically.

Customers with ongoing projects should find this extremely useful. Set up projects once, log time from our widgets – and invoices are automatically generated and sent. How simple is that?

This feature will make its way into Cashboard tonight, 12midnight, PST.

- seth

Yesterday we saw a big spike in traffic when 37signals sent out a newsletter detailing what products integrate with Basecamp.

As you know, Cashboard can import contacts, to-do items, and time entries from Basecamp and has been able to since day 1.

However, the import process for contacts hadn’t seen the kind of attention we gave to other aspects of our integration. We realized that for the way most people work coming from Basecamp our current importer was lackluster.

This morning we released a new build of Cashboard which will let you import people from Basecamp in bulk, create companies they belong to, and give you a nice and tidy report of it all.

As always, we hope you enjoy the improvements.

Payments inside Cashboard can be applied to multiple invoices, as many of you know. However, the old screen didn’t help you accomplish that very well. You had to add up numbers in your head as you went along – applying your payment to multiple invoices.

To make matters worse, the design of the screen didn’t lend itself to the task of recording a payment very easily.

We’ve taken that all into account and made that screen much smarter and more automated.

We’re happy to announce the reworking of the “Record a Payment” screen.

Check it out the full sized version here

The feature will go live this evening around 12midnight, PST.

If you’ve been watching twitter over the past few days you will have noticed a flurry of user interface related changes making their way into the most recent Cashboard build.

Here’s a summary of what we’ve been doing.

Navigation refinement

The old navigation scheme used to present options such as Tasks, Details, and Invoices above the project name. This was causing confusion among some of our customers, and really wasn’t the best way to visualize the association between those links and the header at all.

We’ve moved those options down below the header to accurately show that those items belong to the project you’re viewing.

You’ll also notice we’ve added summary boxes to the top of each estimate and project screen. This information exists in the table footers of each screen, but now you can quickly view important financial information without scrolling to the bottom of the page.

Interface standardization

Cashboard has grown organically, and we haven’t been paying the best attention to all of our user interface elements.

With that in mind, we’ve done a sweep across many screens in the application – paying special attention to how items are created.

The estimate screen used to force new item creation into a slow loading modal dialog. We’ve streamlined adding estimate items with a quick in-page form, just like the rest of our application.

You’ll also notice that buttons to act on items within tables have been cleanly placed above their respective tables.

We believe this cleans up some of the dirt that was starting to make its way into the application and hope you agree. As always – comments, questions, and feedback are warmly welcomed.

Armed to the teeth with user research and statistics we’ve again modified the Cashboard UI in an evolutionary manner.

Dashboard evolution

From now on when you login to Cashboard as an administrator you will again see Projects to Invoice and Outstanding Invoices as the first screen that greets you.

We’ve moved the Quick Reports to the second tab under the Home screen, as those numbers are great to have – but not relevant to the majority of our customers upon each and every login.

Faster navigation

Cashboard has grown to be a very deep system. There’s lots of information here, and some of it was getting buried. Today we’ve also introduced a new menu system for the top-level tabs which should make navigating Cashboard a lot faster.

Each section at the top now allows one-click navigation to any sub-section below it.

We’ve also made it extremely simple to get at any of your active projects or estimates, with one click. In the screenshot above you can see we’re viewing all active projects for our account.

Future changes

Subimage LLC is dedicated to making Cashboard the best software for your business. We’ve got a ton of great updates planned for this year and are very excited to bring them all to you.

Thanks again for being a customer of our service!

Here’s a simple but necessary feature a lot of you have been clamoring for since we launched.

You may now import time entries onto your invoices using a date range.

This will allow you to create invoices for an entire month range, the last two weeks, or whatever you determine is necessary for your clients.

The feature will go live this evening (PST).

Customers of Cashboard know that we’re always striving to improve the service, and we’ll continue to do so in the future.

However, I think today is the perfect time to reflect on how Cashboard has grown during the past year. Without further ado, the highlights…

Features

• Basecamp sync improved
• Unlimited client logins for all account plans
• Fully customizable invoice and estimate templates
• Fully custom email templates and UI
• Timesheet search and reporting
• Invoice search and reporting
• Expanded preferences
• Reporting and visualization
• Autologin for your clients
• Accept deposits for estimates
• PDF receipts for payments
• iPhone Cashboard app

User Interface

• UI refresh
• Spring cleaning
• Task selection
• Estimate design overhaul, including new estimate item types for products
• New widget designs
• Navigation refresh
• Reordering UI update

Workflow

• Invoice worksheet overhaul
• Estimate to invoice
• Scheduled invoice update
• Close / archive estimates
• Add tasks from timesheet entry
• Use single people or companies as clients

We’ve got a ton of new stuff planned for this year in our continued quest to make Cashboard the number one online business service.

Thanks for being a customer – we wish you all the best success in 2009!

- Seth / Subimage LLC