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

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

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

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

Thanks,

Robert

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

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

I also wanted to know if there would be a way for us, down the road, to design our own invoice layout?

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

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