Topic: Feature Requests / Things to Make my Life Easier

Hey guys, great, great app. I’ve been researching for a couple weeks on the multitude of various invoicing software out there and thankfully found you tonight as I was planning to commit to Freshbooks in the next few days. In all honesty, it was the e-mail to .pdf and the amazing templating system that you unleashed (almost!) that really swayed me. Here’s my list of Feature Requests:

1) Sales Tax / Multiple Taxes – (I think I’ll be able to do this with the templating system, but just in case) it would be nice if you could set the tax rate permanently to a specific rate and provide some sort of label for it. As well, a lot of places have one or more taxes that can be applied, so it would be good to be able to set up multiple taxes (even if they aren’t included on all invoices). Up here in Canada, if we’re registered with a GST number we have to include it as well as the tax percentage and the tax amount in dollars on all of our invoices (GST applies to everything on anyone in Canada). So it would be a bit of a pain to be constantly typing in “5%” and then adding the note with the GST number. I haven’t found a way to adjust the Sales Tax permanently anyway…. This may be possible to do through the templating system, but I think it would be better if it was integrated straight into the backend so that it could track the amount of taxes I’ve billed (more information in next point)

• Invoice Totals – a way to view all invoices billed within certain timeframes (that I specify), and then a totals summary at the bottom (extremely useful to handover to my accountant at year end or to do monthly summaries)
• Sales Tax total – easy way to view how much sales tax I’ve billed and should be saving (as well as to hand over to my accountant)
• Payment Totals – same as invoice totals but for payments, so it’s an easy comparison at the end of the year for my accountant to see how much I invoiced and how much I got payed, how much is outstanding, yadee yadee
• Time Reports – I don’t even know what I’d do if it was possible for you to integrate Harvest-style reporting on how I/contractors spend my time. The graphs are so easy to view and decipher that it makes it a really valuable asset to me

3) Late Fee – I need a way to re-issue invoices after a specified period of time, if they haven’t been payed up, with a specified late fee attached (I think 2% is pretty standard, but everyone’s different so it should be adjustable and some people’s billing cycles are different than the standard 30 days). It would be fantastic if on the front page where it shows any outstanding invoices if there was a link to “Assign Late Fee” in the Due column, perhaps below how many days late they are? If this is the case it wouldn’t even need to have the time specified, just the ability to assign a late fee and re-issue the invoice once they’re beyond the due-date. The late fee is assigned every 30 days on the outstanding amount, so if they pay off some, the remainder gets assessed another 2% after 30 more days goes buy… just like your credit cards basically. And a “Send Reminder” button might be nice as well, but that’s not essential, I can always just manually send them an e-mail… but if you think of integrating this make sure we can hook up a custom template for reminders.

4) Due Date – It would be nice to be able to set the default due by date somewhere as well instead of the 14 day cycle that it automatically applies now (I’m aware I can change it, it just seems redundant to have to adjust the date to 30 days every time I create an invoice). I use a 30 day billing cycle, but I know some people are 60-90, especially on government jobs.

In the end, I guess with an API released I’ll be able to just pay someone to build me a system to gather all the reports for me, although I would prefer not to. The Sales Tax (preferably multiple taxes?) should be able to be assigned permanent values within the system though, as well as some form of label, just so that even if the reporting doesn’t come around, we can still pull the data through the API. Additionally, I think the late fee is still something that would need to be integrated on your end and is something that I (and don’t doubt many others) will need in the future. I’m still going to be utilizing Cashboard, I think, simply because the templating system looks so powerful, but you would be helping me and my business out immensely with the integration of some of the above mentioned features.

Take care and great job.

Topic: Tips & Tricks / Create your own Invoice Number methodology

I noticed this when I was poking around, very, very nice. One thing to note though, if someone puts a space between the dash (I had named an invoice “DOR – 175”), it breaks the link when you e-mail the invoice to a client and the “last invoice used” drops back to 0000001 or whatever. I’m just chilling on the free version while I poke around, but figured this would be worth mentioning to you.

Topic: Announcements / Sneak preview...Editable templates

Woweee. You’re definitely setting a new standard for invoicing software once this is released. I hope this is released by Valentine’s Day so that I can spend my reading week getting all my templates ready for year number two of my company :)