You’re the boss…Charting the Roadmap
In the last week, I’ve spent the bulk of my time responding to customer feedback and putting together what I’m calling a “roadmap” for Billing Manager. The roadmap is a set of initiatives and product changes that we’re going make to improve Billing Manager. Let me be clear on this: customers are the boss. At Intuit we believe in customer driven innovation, so I thought I’d ask for your feedback now on where we should be spending our time. Here are some of the top requests, but if there are others, please mention them by adding a comment. If you’re really passionate about sharing you can also join our Customer Council.
- Reports: Billing Manager was designed to have key information surface without having to run reports. We currently offer the Sales Tax Report, but I’ve been hearing that we could do better by offering more reports. What other kinds of reports would be helpful?
- Switch Currency: If you’re outside the U.S. this is an obvious one–you want to send invoices in your home currency. This feature would essentially add a drop-down in the “Settings” area to switch your Billing Manager currency to something other than dollars.
- Importing Contacts: We offer a way to import your contacts from Outlook in the “Settings” tab. What about importing contacts from Gmail, Yahoo!, or Hotmail? This will keep you from having to re-enter names and email addresses.
- Exporting Invoices: Some customers write in about wanting to export their invoices to Excel or CSV because they want to “backup” their invoices. Rest assured that your data is already backed-up or servers , but I’m still hearing this request. Can you help us understand why you want this?
You’re the boss–what should we work on? Vote below and if you could add more details explaining why you’d like these features in the comments, that would be helpful for the team to understand.
June 26, 2009 at 12:11 pm
As a freelancer with a budget Billing Manager has been perfect for all of my needs. One thing that would be neat though would be the addition of a timer on the website to track time for customers. It might have to be on a separate page of it’s own with access to adding time for each customer individually. How it would be organized and stuff is something that I could look into if this is something that you guys would be interested in developing. I could see this as being extremely helpful to people that track times for clients/customers.
With that in mind too it would be cool to be able to track what you are doing during the time that was recorded, as well as store a default hourly rate for the client.
These might sound pretty far-fetched but I could see this tool exploding in the web development and design community if such features were added. As I said before, I’d love to contribute in any way possible given my busy schedule. Let me know if you have any questions in regard to my ideas above.
Oh ya, and PayPal integration would be nice too!
June 26, 2009 at 3:51 pm
@Andrew Thanks for the suggestions. I’m going to forward this to Judd who used to work on our Time Tracking app. (http://quickbooks.intuit.com/product/add-ons/time-tracking-software.jsp)
PayPal is interesting. Do you want to accept credit cards via PayPal merchant or just accept PayPal payments?
Thanks for the shout out, have a good wkend.
June 28, 2009 at 5:08 pm
A more flexible approach for the multiple currencies is to set a default currency, then give the option to change currency for each client. I have clients all over the world, it’s not my currency that’s important, it’s theirs.
June 29, 2009 at 10:34 am
I would like to be able to report on income per client based on date range. I would also like it to include partial payments as well as completed invoices. Right now I can report on paid invoices using the date range to tell me what my current revenue is for the year, but I’m not able to break it down by client or show partially paid invoices.
This is especially helpful at the end of the year to figure out taxes. When companies send me a 1099 it would allow me to easily bounce the number they are reporting to the IRS to what my records show as billed and paid, either completely or partially.
June 29, 2009 at 1:27 pm
@Mike Thanks. I see what you mean: If you have a client who has only partially paid an invoice, when you calculate your income for taxes, it will be overstated because you actually haven’t collected on the total amount. Am I interpreting correctly? –If anyone else can validate this, go ahead as well.
June 29, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Will actually it will be understated since partial payments don’t show up in the paid invoices folder until they are completely paid. It’s not really a report, but a listing of the paid invoices filtered by date. That is the only way I could come up with to list or report on total income for the year. Of course I have to go back to the unpaid invoices one by one to find any partial payments.
July 1, 2009 at 5:48 am
Regarding #1, Reports. I would like to see:
Monthly, quarterly, and yearly statistics
Per client statistics
Date range statistics
Each would break down Income (including partial payments), Amount Due, Amount Past Due.
Also being able to compare two date ranges or overlay last year vs this year would help a user spot trends or make a rough projection for where they are, and where they might be at a later date. (This would help me pay my estimated taxes)
Regarding #4, export of invoices, I believe it’s more of a confidence booster. I’m sure your backup strategy is more robust than mine, so I can presume my data is safe with Billing Manager. However, there is something about being inside a walled garden that can make people uneasy about trying a new system. Letting them know that getting there information out is just as easy as putting it in removes a large barrier to entry. Imagine using any other online service without being able to pull information out on demand, web email, contacts, blog posts. It leaves a user with a feeling of being locked in.
July 1, 2009 at 4:46 pm
@jds580s Thanks for the details on Reports and Exporting data. Anybody can chime in here…which is more important to you?
September 16, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Ideally, we would be able to do both: create and view the reports in Billing Manager, then export them in CSV format. Both functions are extremely important.
The online reports are enable us to refer to a client’s invoicing and payment history as we create new estimates and invoices (I’m hoping the reports would include categories or columns for *all* transactions with each client: estimates, invoices, and payments, with dates).
The exported reports (CSV) are important not for backup purposes (I’m satisfied your backups are more secure than mine) but for two other reasons:
1) I want to be able to slice and dice my estimating, billing and collection data in a variety of ways that are not pertinent to Billing Manager. A CSV report allows me to do this without retyping the data.
2) In the event that Billing Manager or my Internet access goes down for any reason, I need to be able to access this vital data promptly, no matter what. It’s critical to my business. I agree with @jds580s that potential and current customers (that’s me) are reluctant to invest time entering large volumes of data into a system that does not allow us to get it out—and by “out” I mean in a reusable format.
I have other wish-list items, which I will share in the appropriate threads.
Thanks for listening!
July 2, 2009 at 5:47 am
Glad to contribute, two other small features I would like to see are:
1. Ability to change the default greeting on emailed invoices.
Currently it’s “Dear FIRSTNAME LASTNAME (COMPANY NAME):”. I prefer the more informal “FIRSTNAME,” in most instances when dealing with smaller businesses and “FIRSTNAME LASTNAME,” for new clients or larger organizations. Currently I change this manually on each invoice I send. I would love a template setting that lets you choose your default greeting.
2. Adding an optional “Project/Job” field to the invoice which would automatically get added to the invoice summary of the outgoing emails that clients receive. One complaint I’ve heard from clients that receive my invoices is that they don’t know what job it goes to just by reading the email. Even after clicking on the link in the email it still doesn’t show them what the invoice is for, requiring a third action on their part be clicking “View and Print Invoice”. It would be nice if that was included in the Invoice Summary in the email and the “You have received an invoice” landing page after clicking the link in the email. Billing Manager users could input Purchase Order Numbers, or the name/number of the Project or Job.
July 6, 2009 at 8:10 am
Glad to hear that you guys are accepting suggestions. Here’s some suggestions (coming from a paying customer):
1. Ability to remove “Billing Manager” branding and replace it with my own, I feel that it seems a bit unprofessional to send someone invoices with a “Billing Manager” footer, +1 for having the ability the re-brand the landing page that customers see when the pay for an invoice.
2. Ability to add in variables in the emails, I usually add in the items of the invoice into the emails, this would be a super sweet feature.
3. Add in a bi-annual (6 month) option for recurring invoices.
4. I know this might be a long shot, but giving clients the ability to login and review their account and pay their balance would be awesome.
I’m less concerned with reports and time tracking, than I am about giving clients the impression that this is just not some “cookie cutter” system and that it’s something that we (as a company) took the time to do for the customer.
Thanks for listening,
- Vann
July 8, 2009 at 9:41 pm
I second Andrew Ariotti in adding paypal integration. I know you folks are probably pushing your own processor, but I already use paypal. I’d love to see IPN or Paypal Pro integration. =)
July 9, 2009 at 8:12 am
@John Thanks for calling PayPal out. Is your feeling that most freelancers / small businesses already use PayPal and would be adding their account to Billing Manager or signing up for the first time with PP? Anyone welcome to chime in.
August 22, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Currency currency please. Limiting the currency to dollars limits the use of Billing Manager to US. So it would be great if there can be an option to choose currency. Thanks, Billing Manager still is a great tool for my business.
September 30, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Another suggestion: Have an optional “Date” as a field for each billed item in the invoice (like “Date Service Provided” or “Date of Purchase”, but something that would fit a variety of situations). Also have optional fields for “Start time” and “End time,” and then have the program automatically calculate the hours. For now, I put the date, start time, end time, and a few other necessary details in the “Additional Item Information” field, but I think it would look cleaner and easier for the client to read if those were separate fields.
Also, one client asked me to provide daily subtotals on my invoice. If the date were a separate field, then I would think it would be easy to also provide a check-box with the option of including daily subtotals on the invoice.
I’ve just started using Billing Manager, but so far, it’s a great help!
October 12, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Invoicing from a smart phone would be probably the best thing I could hope for. I saw this tool and was over joyed till I found out that you can do everything but send an invoice from your phone. The disappointment was high.