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 %}