It’s been about a month since the last major news from Cashboard HQ.

Have you missed us?

Fear not, we’ve been working on a slew of updates and improvements to Cashboard. This time we’ve targeted estimates for improvement.

Here’s a quick overview of the changes:

• Estimate details and items have been combined in a “worksheet” view, like invoices
• Estimates are now identified by assigned ID (like invoices)
• Tax your estimates
• New estimate item types
  • Tasks (for hourly items like before)
  • Products (for physical goods)
  • Generic (flexible items for anything you can imagine!)
• Create an invoice directly from an estimate

Estimate details

We’ve transformed the estimate details and items screens into a worksheet view, just like we did with invoices awhile back.

Of course, we weren’t satisfied to rest on our design laurels. You’ll notice this view is slightly different than before.

We’ve modified editing details to happen in a dialog box, which ensures you’ve saved your changes before returning to work with estimate items. A small but very important workflow change which amounts to a lot of saved time.

New item types

Cashboard originally was released to accommodate one method of estimating projects – by the hour.

While this is definitely helpful for a range of industries it wasn’t good enough for everyone.

Keeping that in mind, we’ve modified Cashboard to work for any type of estimate you can dream up. Hourly items still remain as Tasks, while we’ve added two new item types: Products and Generic items.

Products are great for materials you might be purchasing for a project. This could be anything from server hardware to lumber.

Generic items are a little more interesting, offering you the ability to estimate any type of work you might imagine. Perhaps you’re a copywriter? You can now estimate in “words”, “paragraphs”, or “pages” as shown here.

Template updates

This new functionality wouldn’t be complete without some modifications to the default estimate template.

Unlike before, customers who don’t utilize Cashboard’s high and low estimate numbers won’t see anything out of the ordinary on their estimate documents.

We’ve also updated the Cashboard liquid variable reference documentation.

Still not done…

All of these changes go towards making Cashboard the most flexible and easy to use project quoting solution on the market.

Still, be on the lookout for a couple more additions like a streamlined way to accept deposits and estimate search.