In The Pipeline: Recurring Invoices
We’re always thinking of new features we’d like to add (and ways to improve existing ones!) to Billing Manager. Working close to the metal as a member of the engineering team, I thought I’d share some of our ideas with you.
Standard disclaimer applies: the features below are “in the hopper” and there’s no guarantee they’ll make it into the application exactly as shown or described.
With that out of the way, let’s get down to business. The most-requested feature that should be part of our next major release in the coming months is support for recurring invoices. Here’s a mockup of our recurring invoice creation interface (notice that it’s embedded in the regular invoice page, right above the “Your Company” section):
Our goal is to make this component as simple and transparent as possible without sacrificing functionality. To me, that means plain-english descriptions of how recurrence occurs, clear indications of when recurring invoices are sent, and the ability to take manual control of the process (the idea behind the “Create draft invoice on set date and warn me” option).
We’re thinking of adding a new “Recurring” folder to the left-hand navigation bar right under your “Drafts” folder. Here’s what it should look like:
As you can see, we’re retaining the basic look and feel of the other invoice folders so you won’t have to learn a whole new set of interactions to handle recurrence. Look for more information in the “History” area of the invoice, too, as we’ll be keeping track of when recurring invoices are created and automatically sent (assuming that’s how you’ve configured things).
One more thing – we plan to make our other invoice folders smarter to take advantage of recurring functionality. Here’s an idea for “Drafts” folder’s filtering interface:
This allows for dashboard-like access so you can quickly see all of your unsent recurring invoices and send them all in a batch – no need to manually click “Send” on each one.
That’s all the time I have for right now. I’m looking forward to posting more in the coming weeks about some of the other features we’re working on, like statement and estimate support. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts on our plans for recurring invoices. Like them? Hate them? Are we missing something? We really do value your feedback, so please let us know if there’s anything we can do to help keep your business running smoothly with Billing Manager.
May 19, 2008 at 6:00 pm
This is probably the most important thing we do (monthly recurring invoices) and to be able to automate it saves us a tremendous amount of time and energy. We’re often so busy working on the next big job that we forget we have hosting to bill for 50 clients! Thanks so much for adding this. I hope it comes online soon. If you are going to serve industries with ongoing services, this is a MUST.
Will the merchant account add-on support automatic recurring charges to a credit card or ACH draft? That is important too and makes the whole process even more idiot proof. (Yes I need that).
John
May 20, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Hi John -
Thanks for your comments. You’ll be happy to know that ACH is definitely coming to Billing Manager. Automatically recurring charges, however, are on the roadmap but further out (probably more like late this year).
And don’t worry, recurring invoice support is coming soon – us engineers are hard at work on it.
We’re right there with you when it comes to making things “idiot proof”, especially where your money is concerned. To that end, hit the Feedback page in Billing Manager and let us know of any ideas you may have to improve your experience – big or small, even if you think they’re “dumb” or obvious suggestions. We really do love to hear from our users, and input like yours is what drives us to improve the product.
Thanks
Mark
July 2, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I look forward to having this feature implemented! Has there been any updates since it was posted May 8, 2008?
I also wanted to know if there would be a way for us, down the road, to design our own invoice layout?
July 3, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Legacycx -
You’ll be pleased to know that we’re QA-ing the recurring invoice feature right now and it will be part of our next release – look for it in about two weeks’ time. Also coming in the release is support for estimates along with the standard overall performance enhancements and bugfixes.
The ability to design your own invoice layout will likely be further down the road…we’re still playing with the idea of generating PDF invoices, which would make the process much easier – I think it’d be great to have some kind of drag-n-drop interface where you could place the various pieces of the invoice on a page, set colors, fonts, and so on, then have our hypothetical PDF generator spit out invoices made to your specifications. Since we just use straight HTML for invoice display right now and rely on CSS for styling, there are all sorts of headaches involved in making sure all of our invoice templates look correct across browsers (including when users print them), so moving to PDF would be our best bet for user-styled invoices.
Hope that answered your question. Thanks for using Billing Manager!
Mark
July 4, 2008 at 10:37 am
Mark,
Thanks for the reply!
You read my mind regarding the PDF invoices. That feature, to me, is more important than redesigning invoice layouts. The reason why is because some of my customers are not e-mail/Internet folks, so I have to print out and mail them their invoices. Converting them to PDF then printing them insures that the layout remains consistent from invoice to invoice and doesn’t add the extra information that my browser adds (URL, date, time, etc – granted I can disable that in the page setup screen).
Regarding the invoice designs – I was exactly thinking on the lines you described. Using a drag-n-drop feature feature would be the most ideal.
Thanks for all reply Mark. Keep up the great work.
Regards,
Robert
July 4, 2008 at 10:42 am
Oh, there was one other thing I wanted to ask (sorry if this is off topic). Are there any plans on shortening the URL for the invoices? Maybe do something like tinyurl.com?
Thanks,
Robert
July 4, 2008 at 11:28 am
Robert -
Totally agree about the need for shorter URLs. I’ll float this by the rest of the team, but I think it’d be good to:
1. Set up some kind of tinyurl-like redirector under the intuit domain (say, r.intuit.com/invoice-identifier-goes-here) – making it clear to your customers that they’re clicking on a “trusted” link instead of a short-url service they may not be familiar with.
2. Use a Base32 encoding mechanism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base32) – basically meaning the junk tacked on to the end of your invoice URLs will be shorter and only include “regular” letters and numbers to uniquely identify the invoice (plus stuff like “Xx” in our URLs right now would be “xx” in Base32, eliminating typos due to mismatched letter casing). One of the reasons we haven’t done this yet is our concern for privacy: any URL obfuscation we do should not be guessable in a reasonable amount of computing time by a third party, which Base32 doesn’t help with. The trick is making URLs as simple, short and secure as we can. Doing the first two is easy; throw security into the mix and it’s a bit harder
Now that primary development for the recurring and estimate features is finished, I should have a bit more time to blog about new features – if we decide to go ahead with shorter and simpler URLs, I’ll certainly include our plans for that in a future post.
Thanks for the feedback!
Mark
July 6, 2008 at 7:33 am
Mark,
Thanks for the reply. You could even just stick with mod_rewrite and just write the URLs to make them shorter.
In other words, take a URL like:
https://billingmanager.intuit.com/billing/invoice/payor-view.url?id=AnYgnh6fO08%3E
and using mod_rewrite, have it written as:
https://r.intuit.com/invoice/id/AnYgnh6fO08%3E
This would make it shorter, and easier to read. So the users don’t have to type in payor-view.url?id=AnYgnh6fO08%3E
Not the best solution, but would definitely make the URLs a little more user friendly.
Thanks for your help Mark,
Robert
July 14, 2008 at 10:53 am
Hi Robert -
Sorry for the delayed response/comment approval – for some reason wordpress didn’t shoot me an email when you commented. Agree that mod_rewrite is probably the simplest way to shorten URLs (less work and simpler to maintain than manually rigging a redirection script)…we might just end up using it along with the improved parameter encoding strategy above to get this feature implemented.
It’s nice to know we have users with real web development chops!
Mark
July 29, 2008 at 10:03 am
Any movement yet on invoicing on the spot with your iphone? I don’t want to purchase laptops for all my employees but I want them to invoice and get payment right when the job is completed. When do you plan to release this update?
August 7, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Hi tdwinkler,
Beefing up the iPhone app is something we’ve definitely gotten feedback from with a lot of our iPhone users, and one we’re strongly considering implementing soon. We’re currently juggling a couple big improvements to Billing Manager, but appreciate your feedback and will take it into consideration.
Thanks for choosing Billing Manager,
Keyvan