UPDATE These features were launched as of 1/9/2011

We’ll be launching some new features this weekend that you all should enjoy.

One is a highly requested change, and the other is a revision to an existing feature that makes it easier to use. Both of these features work together to give you more flexibility when creating invoices for your estimates.

Percentage Invoicing

Simply put, this feature allows you to invoice for a percentage of your entire estimate.

For instance, you can invoice for 50% of your estimated cost up front, then 25% two weeks into a project, and the remaining 25% when your project is complete. There is no scheduling built into this feature at this time, so you will need to manually create your invoices for the time being.

To help you keep track of all of this, we’re including a new sidebar that lists all invoices associated with an estimate, as shown below.

Deposit Invoices

Deposit invoices replace the current feature on estimates where you can require a deposit up front for payment.

Deposit invoices act just like regular invoices – except any payment collected for a deposit invoice will still be available as outstanding credit to be applied to a real invoice at a later date.

Many of you were confused by the process of requiring a deposit, and many of your clients didn’t understand that they should pay against an estimate. This solution should solve both of those issues.

Going forward, if you’d like to request pre-payment for an estimate or project, you simply create an invoice for future work from your estimate then send that to your client. You can also create deposit invoices from the global create button – so it’s available to those of you who don’t use estimates as well.

You can easily see which deposit invoices are outstanding from your invoice list, as shown above. We believe this clarifies the entire process of accepting a payment up front for your clients, and makes it a lot easier to manage for you.

What happens to old estimates with deposits

We’ve removed the deposit field from all of your current estimates.

In it’s place we’ve created a corresponding Deposit Invoice for

• Estimates that have a deposit recorded against them
• Estimates that required a deposit and are no older than a month

Any payments collected in the past and held as a deposit for your estimates will be now associated with the new deposit invoices created for those estimates.

Going forward

As always, Cashboard is a work in progress. I’d love to hear any comments or questions you have on these new features. Feel free to leave them as a comment here, or email them to our support address.