I took a few days this week to knock out the most requested odds and ends for invoicing.

Here’s what’s changed.

Smart defaults for invoices

This is something major you all should love.

I’m a huge preference hater as many of you know who’ve communicated with me via support emails. You might have even asked for a way to set your default billing term to 30 days, or perhaps you’d like to include time entries on every invoice created. Luckilly, now you can.

Invoices created within Cashboard now default to the settings used for the last invoice created. In English, this means if your last invoice’s due date was 30 days from its invoice date, your next one will be as well (and so on).

Auto-send scheduled invoices

This is a great feature for predictable invoices that have standard monthly rates.

Before now you’d have to login in order to send an invoice created from a schedule. A simple checkbox has been added for all invoice schedules that will allow you to have the system auto-send any invoice created.

Keep in mind the invoice will automatically go to all people inside the client company which the invoice belongs to, and no time entries will be imported to the new invoice.

Automatic late fees

Another highly requested feature touches down. You can now specify a percentage that gets applied every N days your invoice is past due.

Late fees are applied to your invoices automatically. There is nothing for you to do, unless you’ve modified your HTML invoice template.

If you have modified your invoice template, please either revert your template to the default, or add this snippet of code near the bottom of ‘html_invoice’.

{% if invoice.late_cost > 0 %}
  <tr class="summary">
    <td class="first numeric" colspan="4">
      <b>Late Fee</b> - {{ invoice.late_percentage }}% every {{ invoice.late_period_in_days }} days past due
    </td>
    <td class="numeric money_gain last">{{ invoice.late_cost | format_money }}</td>
  </tr>
{% endif %}

New liquid variables

New variables have also been added which respect the late fee.
For a complete reference please see this page.

- seth