And we’re back…
It’s been an exciting few months here at Billing Manager and the greater Intuit. I’ve got some good news to share! We now have a product marketing and development team focused on growing and improving Billing Manager. I’ll share more about the team and what we’re working on soon, but I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that we’re here and to introduce myself.
My name is Will Hambly and I’m the product marketer for Billing Manager. I started with the team a few weeks ago and have been with Intuit since 2007, working in product management and marketing in the small business space (here are two of the products I worked on). I’m also an electric guitar player, avid coffee drinker, and like to get outside and run.
As I’ve ramped up on Billing Manager, one thing I’ve been focusing on is speaking with customers and learning what you like and don’t like about Billing Manager. The goal of this is to figure out what we need to start working on now and also what else customers want to see from our invoicing app. If you’ve got feedback you want to share or are willing to meet over the phone or in person (if you’re near Mountain View, CA, consider this an invitation for lunch at our campus), go ahead and reply to this post and we’ll arrange something.
There’s a lot more to come, so expect and introduction to our development team and to hear about what we’re working on to make the product better. Happy Friday. Cheers!
Tags: introductions
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
June 12, 2009 at 12:28 pm
One feature I’ve been recommending for a while is some basic statistics.
I love the running tally shown next to Unpaid, Overdue, Paid, & Draft invoices, however I would really like to see a “Reports” button (or similar) that would show me things like:
1. Amount Billed between (user input dates)
2. Payments Recorded between (user input dates)
3. Outstanding/unpaid between (user input dates)
4. Outstanding/overdue between (user input dates)
Even better if it could do some fancy pie/bar charts on the main screen of this page showing a quick view of total $ amounts, $ amounts only for the current year, $ amounts only for the current month.
I would also find useful either pie or bar charts showing – paid vs unpaid vs overdue, perhaps also draft and estimates.
There are some pleasant looking AJAX + jquery,flash,javascript charts and examples at the link below that could fit will with the Billing Manager design.
http://php-ajax-code.blogspot.com/2007/08/cool-charts-graph-with-ajax-jquery.html
Perhaps some other options to show:
1. total recorded payments by each client
2. percentage of payments received by due date
3. clients that pay on time
4. line chart showing monthly recorded payments over the year (to illustrate most profitable months)
5. payments received broken down by services offered
You could really go nuts with this feature, there are so many possibilities.
June 12, 2009 at 6:13 pm
As a fellow guitar and coffee enthusiast, let me speak to you from the heart…
1. Please provide the ability to export data in a CSV or similar format. If I can’t backup my work, I can’t trust the product. After using it regularly and loving it since Oct. 2008, this really has me on edge.
2. The pdf invoice when I email is great. Some clients just like having that without clicking around. I wish the PDF name would default to something like my company name and Invoice #.
3. Custom messaging. I love the ability to customize my messaging when I email the client. It’d be handy if there were certain variables that I could include in my default template messages such as invoice number, company name, etc.
June 19, 2009 at 9:13 am
@hairybrew I like your CSV idea and definitely understand the need for it. Also, many others have this same request. I’ve got this on the roadmap, thanks!
June 13, 2009 at 2:55 am
Will – Multiple currency support! Please!
June 13, 2009 at 9:18 am
The sales tax report is completely unusable, which is the only reason we can’t switch to billing manager.
Washington State (among others) is a destination based sales tax state, meaning we collect and report sales tax based off where the service was provided/equipment was delivered. Our simple workaround has been to put the customer’s location code in the company name field.
What’s lacking is we need to filter the sales tax by when it was paid, not invoiced. We don’t need a sales tax summary like currently, but rather we need a full list of invoices with the company name/location code, the invoice amount (pre-tax), and the sales tax collected.
June 15, 2009 at 8:26 am
@websitewa Thanks for the reply. We’ve been hearing that our international customers want to be able to process their invoices in their home currencies. An example would be switching the currency in Billing Manager over to yen for a Japanese business. Is this your case? Would love to hear more.
June 17, 2009 at 8:18 am
Personally speaking, I just want to be able to change the currency symbol from $ to £ and I would be happy. I know implementing any feature is far from trivial but allowing users to generate invoice in multiple currencies will massively increase your potential user base.
June 18, 2009 at 5:57 am
I’m not sure what happened to my comment last week, but just to reiterate in case it was lost…
My #1 concern is not having the ability to export data in CSV or similar format. I’ve been using the product since 2008, and not having the ability to backup my work (aside from pdfs) is a big worry.
June 19, 2009 at 9:16 am
@hairybrew I had issues with the comments filter–should be fixed now so that all comments appear after you submit them.
June 24, 2009 at 5:06 am
Hi,
I would like to be able to use your remittance stub, except that it prints on a seperate page by default and I am not able to formatt it to print on the same page if needed.
Also, I am not sure I can figure out how to use your electronic check payment option. Do I have to have a merchant account for that?
June 24, 2009 at 10:37 am
@gbsllc Thanks for the idea. I’ve followed up with an email–I hope you got it.