News

Professional Web Design firm Chromatic posted a very kind review of Cashboard, along with 10 other “absolutely necessary web-based tools for a freelance web designer”.

Check it out if you have a moment.

In response to inquires from service-oriented companies that bill at employee rates rather than a set rate per task we’ve launched more flexible billing options on all projects.

Cashboard now has three project billing types, including the old default. This should stop you from having to use a workaround to bill the way you’re used to.

Explanation of the new billing types

• Task rate (default)
  Invoices tasks on your project at the rate set on a per-task basis
• Employee rate
  Invoices tasks on your project at the rate set for each employee tracking time for it. When invoiced, tasks will be broken into multiple invoice line items – one per employee who tracked time on the task.
• Non-billable / internal
  All time tracked for this project is marked non-billable. These types of projects will also not show up on your dashboard under the ‘projects to invoice’ section.

We look forward to your feedback after you’ve had a chance to interact with the new project billing types. We’ve also had requests to bill projects “on a retainer” and are looking into that workflow to see if it’s viable for inclusion in this feature.

If you believe we’ve missed your billing workflow here, please let us in know in the comments section.

We’re almost through knocking out the remaining workflow issues before tackling some larger items on our to-do list. (API, Expense management)

The latest batch of workflow improvements has to do with invoices and should be very useful for you. These features will go live tonight (3/18/2009).

Auto-reminders

We’re always looking for ways to help you automate your electronic invoicing more.

Now you can set up any invoice inside Cashboard to automatically email your clients a set number of days before your invoice is due, and an interval of days after it’s past due. This feature uses a new email template (email_invoice_reminder) that you can customize for your business.

For instance, we’ve set up our invoices to mail our clients 5 days before they’re due, then every 3 days after that. The email reminder template takes into account if the invoice due soon or past due, and sends the appropriate message to our clients.

In the interest of keeping this feature as simple as possible, it will email all clients your invoice is assigned to. This means if you’ve got a company with 5 employees set as your client all five of them will get the invoice reminder.

Early payment discount

Cashboard has supported charging your clients extra if they pay their invoice late, but up until now we’ve missed the other side of things.

Today that’s been fixed as we introduce early payment discounts. Research has shown that offering your clients an incentive to pay early usually entices them to do so.

Of course with any major change there’s always new template variables. We’ve updated the reference with the latest information you’ll need.

For those of you who’ve customized your invoice templates already, you’ll need to add a bit of code to support the new feature.

This should give you access to what you need on the html_invoice template.

    {{ # EARLY DISCOUNT }}
    {% if invoice.should_apply_early_discount == true %}
      <tr class="summary">
        <td class="first numeric" colspan="4">
          <b>Early Payment Discount</b> - {{ invoice.early_discount_percentage }}% every {{ invoice.early_period_in_days }} days paid early
        </td>
        <td class="numeric money_gain last">
          {{ invoice.early_discount | format_money }}
        </td>
      </tr>
    {% endif %}

Sometimes your clients don’t pay you on time and the invoices pile up. It’s a part of life when you’re a freelancer or small business. Getting paid might be troublesome sometimes, but managing your payments and sending multiple invoices at the same time should never be.

Last night we launched a set of features that make dealing with this scenario much easier using Cashboard.

Multi-invoice statement

When any of your clients are behind on their invoice payments Cashboard automatically notices this and lets you know. If this situation arises and you try to send an invoice to your client you will be presented with a new option to send a multi-invoice statement.

This new statement provides a summary of all outstanding invoices, along with each individual invoice included. As you’ve come to expect, it’s all customizable via our templating system and you can PDF the output with one click of your mouse.

You’ll also be able to access this document from the Account Balances screen, and any invoice your client has pending.

Full balance payment

We’ve also taken the initiative to clean up the Cashboard client UI as well.

Now when logged in, your clients will be greeted with an easy to read overview of what invoices they have pending, and how much they owe you.

Those of you who’ve enabled online payments with Cashboard will also have the added benefit of being able to accept payment in full for your client’s outstanding balance.

Cashboard will handle accepting the payment and applying it to all relevant invoices, oldest first.

This enables your clients to pay a portion of their outstanding balance, or the balance in full. We even smartly deal with clients of yours that belong to multiple companies (Authorize.net only at the moment).

We’re constantly striving to improve the workflow for all of our customers. If this saves you a few minutes a month, we’ve done our job. Look forward to more things coming soon, as always.

- s