Are customers paying you on time? If the answer is “no”, then you are not alone.

In the Intuit Billing Manager “Get Paid” Survey, we found that:

• 42% of small businesses state that “getting paid quickly by customers” is one of the key issues that keeps them up at night
• 33% of small business owners state that they have more overdue payments today compared to last year
• about 40% of small business owners have aging invoices of over 30 days

Surprised by the stats?  We weren’t.  We understand that getting paid faster is very important to a business owner.  That is why Billing Manager features QuickBooks Merchant Service—a complete payment solution.  With QBMS, customers can pay your invoices right away.  All they have to do is enter their credit card, debit card or checking account information onto the invoice that you’ve emailed them.  It’s that simple!

Interested?  Then, check out QBMS for free!  Right now, we are offering a free 30-day trial of QBMS.  And to sweeten the deal, we are also offering a free 6-month Billing Manager Premium Account subscription to the first 100 Billing Manager users who are approved for a QBMS account.  Now, how cool is that?  You’ll be able to easily create estimates and invoices, manage invoices, automate recurring invoices and get paid faster.

With Billing Manager and QBMS, you can say good-bye to those sleepless nights! 

They say that in a tough economy, it’s the best time to start a new business.   That seems counter intuitive at first, but makes sense when you consider other factors.  It may be easier to negotiate prices for offices space, materials, or workers.  This NY Times article talks about lots of companies that are having trouble getting paid these days.

If you are going solo, you may be starting out part-time, and the economy may provide opportunities for people to use your products or services if it helps them during these times.  We’ve always hoped that a product like Billing Manager, with its free features, would be useful for those brand new businesses.

I guess it comes down to whether you are a glass half-full or half-empty person.  I’ve always been an optimist myself, and have faith that things will turn around again and start a new cycle.  Do you think this time presents a good opportunity?  Have you always considered starting a new business?  Are you sitting on the fence?

This week we launched a new feature for users of our QuickBooks Merchant Service - the ability to process checks electronically! We’re really jazzed about this feature for a few reasons

1. Most small businesses we’ve talked to accept checks (even more so than credit cards) when invoicing
2. It’s important for a small business to get paid FAST. Waiting even days for a payment on an invoice to arrive can really hurt the bottom line.
3. Processing checks electronically will allow you to get paid instantly!

All Billing Manager users who sign up for QuickBooks Merchant Service will now get electronic check processing capability in addition to their existing credit card processing. For your customers, all they’ll have to do to pay you with a check electronically is enter their routing and account number along with their personal info. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Let us know if you’ve been using eCheck, we’d love to know what you think about it!

The goal of Intuit Billing Manager has always been making it as easy as possible for you to bill customers.  We do know that sending an invoice is, unfortunately, only half the battle. So we set ourselves another goal of making it just as easy for you to be paid by your customers; whether it be online, in person, or on the phone.  Luckily, we (Intuit) are no stranger to situations like this, over 200,000 small businesses already process payments with us.  We simply baked our popular (and reliable!) QuickBooks Merchant Service right into Billing Manager and emerged with QuickBooks Merchant Service for Billing Manager!

By becoming a Merchant, your Billing Manager “accepted payment types” will become a much more powerful tool - you’ll be able to accept credit cards and checks electronically as forms of payment. QuickBooks Merchant Service for Billing Manager will allow your customers to pay your invoices right away by entering their credit card, debit card, or checking account information onto the invoice you’ve e-mailed them. The moment they submit payment, it is transferred to your bank account. How easy is that?  Some other payment processing services require you send your customer to their site to pay, we don’t.  Some other payment processing services require your customer signs up for their service to pay, we don’t.  We keep your customer’s payment experience consistent with what they’re used to… we keep it all within Billing Manager. Let’s take a look at what the invoice sending experience is like (for you and your customers) when you become a QBMS Merchant.

1. What you’ll first notice after becoming a QBMS Merchant is the difference between accepted payment types when you create an invoice (and also in the settings).
As a merchant, you’ll have access to payment processing for all major credit cards as well as the ability to accept electronic checks!

2.  After creating and sending an invoice, your customers will see a new “Pay Online” option when they open the link in your e-mail.

3.  Here’s what your customer will see, if they want to pay you right away and clicks “Pay Online.”

Your customer has the option to pay by either credit card or electronic check. Above we show you what they would see if they select credit card.

And here is the information they will be asked to provide should they select electronic check.

4. Once your customer supplies this information, the payment will be transferred directly from their account to yours, and will mark your invoice as paid!

This service is what keeps our free Billing Manager account free, but because of that, becoming a Merchant does cost a small fee.  Take a look at the cost breakdowns below as we compare to the average cost for similar services that are available.

If this sounds good to you, just click the QuickBooks Merchant Service button on the left side of Billing Manager next time you sign in! We promise that it’s easier than you might think!

On Wednesday October 8th at approximately 9:00PM PST, Billing Manager will be unavailable for about an hour while we upgrade our system to our latest release. To know what’s going into the newest release, stay tuned to this blog later in the week :).

We apologize for any invoicing inconvenience this may cause you and thank you in advance for you patience.

We’re hard at work on the next release of Billing Manager, most of which is related to under-the-hood performance improvements (especially important as we get more user sign-ups every day), but I thought I’d take a sec and touch on another “coming soon” feature that’ll be a bit more visible: the Billing Manager API.

API, for the non-technical crowd, means Application Programming Interface - a way to talk to the data stored in Billing Manager without using a web browser.  If you’re a software developer, you’ll be able to write applications that talk to Billing Manager in cool new ways.  If you’re just a regular Billing Manager user, you’ll be able to use applications and plug-ins others have built on top of the API.  We’ve already got some ideas kicking around internally, like a native iPhone app, Blackberry app, and export-to-Excel capabilities.  The API will open the doors for these and lots of other things we haven’t even thought of yet.  In addition to our own add-ons, we’re looking forward to seeing some creative software built by the community that will make everyone’s Billing Manager experience better.  We’ll keep you posted on the API’s progress and official release date as we flesh everything out in the coming weeks.

And, just in case you’re worried about security, know that using the API or applications built on top of the API will require authentication just like Billing Manager does today.  You can’t see anyone else’s data, and no one else can see yours.

Developers: the default API interface will likely be RESTful XML.  Are there other formats you’d like to see (JSON, etc.)?  Any features beyond the obvious ones like creating an invoice that are absolute must-haves in the API (e.g. getting invoice history information)?  We really would like input from our users, since this feature is for you!

We’ve heard from MANY of our users that they would like us to support other currencies. We understand, Billing Manager after all is a web app, and with that comes the fact that anyone in the world can use us, no matter which country they are in. This is great news, because we feel that we have the best invoicing app on the web, so we’d like everyone out there to give us a shot.

Yes, we did indeed initially build the app to support the United States, but we are super excited to start working on developing support for currencies outside the US, and along with that foreign addresses, date and currency formats. Specific currencies we’ve gotten a lot of requests for include pounds, euros, rupees, and rand. We’ve heard a lot of feedback from users asking for those, but is there anything else you’d like to see? To be honest we’ve received fewer requests for multi-language support, but people have definitely been interested in customizing the text of an invoice to their local language. If you have any opinions or requests on any of the above, leave a comment!

Billing Manager helps you organize invoices. Because the program files invoices automatically, you may have found yourself wondering where an invoice is or how to move an invoice between folders. Billing Manager Help will soon feature more information on navigating folders to work with invoices. Meanwhile, here’s how it works.

An invoice goes through various stages after you create it. For example, you create a draft of the invoice, then you print it or e-mail it to your customer. At that point, the invoice is sent, but unpaid. Then you receive payment and the invoice is paid. To help you track status, Billing Manager stores each invoice in the folder that reflects its current state. For example, an invoice you created but didn’t send lives in the Drafts folder (see diagram for more details).

Actions cause an invoice to move from one Billing Manager folder to another.

• If the invoice is created but not printed or e-mailed, Billing Manager saves it in the Drafts folder.
• If you print or e-mail an invoice, Billing Manager moves it to the Unpaid folder. (If you don’t want to print or email, you can manually move the invoice to the Unpaid folder. Read on to learn how.)
• When a customer pays the invoice online or you record a payment, Billing Manager moves it to the Paid folder.

To see a list of invoices in a particular state, click a folder name in the left task panel. If you click Unpaid, for example, you get a list of invoices that have not been paid.

Click a folder name to open it.

Move an invoice

Now you understand the workflow, but there’s one twist. Say you create an invoice, but don’t want to print or e-mail it. However, you probably still want to get paid for it. Because the invoice is stuck in the Drafts folder, “record payment” options don’t appear.

You must move the folder into the Unpaid folder in order to receive payments against it. To do so:

1. Select the invoice’s Print link or Print button.
2. Within the preview screen that appears, click the File as Unpaid button.

Ever had to send the same invoice out over and over again? Yes, it’s annoying to repeat work. That’s why we created the ability to make recurring invoices! Now, when creating a new invoice, you’ll see a link for Create a Recurring Invoice. When you click on it, you’ll have the option to choose when the invoice is sent, how frequently it’s sent, and when you’d like it to recur until (or just leave it blank if you’ll like it to recur forever). Billing Manager will show you the dates when the next few invoices will go out based on your settings.

You can also choose to send them out automatically on the dates defined, or if you’d prefer, Billing Manager can create a draft invoice instead, and will notify you when they’re ready to be sent, letting you choose when they go out.

Have you been using recurring invoicing? Any changes you’d make to the feature?

Judging by our logs, it looks like a lot of you use Internet Explorer to access Billing Manager. You might be forced to do this - you’re at work, you’re on a public machine, at a friend’s house, etc. But if not, did you know that there are better web browsers out there? Firefox is the most popular free browser, and Safari is gaining marketshare as well, with good reason. Google just made a splash with this week’s announcement of its Chrome browser, so there’s another contender (although Chrome is still an early beta and is Windows-only at the moment).

So, Internet Explorer users, why would you want to switch? Two main reasons: speed and stability. Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera (not yet supported on Billing Manager) absolutely smoke all versions of Internet Explorer in both categories (especially Internet Explorer 6). If you haven’t tried using Billing Manager with anything but Internet Explorer, do yourself a favor and give a different browser a shot. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the performance boost. Us Billing Manager engineers are big fans of Firefox and Safari, and we’re excited about Chrome’s prospects because it’s fast and works out-of-the-box with Billing Manager since it uses the same rendering engine as Safari. Once you leave Internet Explorer, you’ll never want to go back. Trust us

But don’t take my word for it - try things out yourself. Feel free to plug your favorite Billing Manager browser in the comments!

PS for performance junkies who like to live on the bleeding edge: here are instructions for how to download and tweak nightly builds of Firefox, and there are Webkit nightlies available here. Note that nightly builds aren’t for the casual user - expect fast peformance, but don’t be surprised by crashes!

PS for Opera fans: you probably know Opera isn’t officially supported by Billing Manager. I can’t tell you on the record it’s safe to use with Billing Manager since we haven’t QA’d the Opera experience thoroughly…but I will say that it works great for me when I tell the browser to “Identify as Firefox”

We decided up front when launching Billing Manager to adopt an Agile development methodology to foster rapid evolution of our web site. At Intuit we’ve decided we want to iterate quickly on team ideas, employee suggestions, and Voice of the Customer feedback. We want to have many small incremental changes and enhancements, and measure their customer response each time.

To attain this speed, we develop using the Agile development model. The Agile method means we work on many small, fast releases (called sprints) instead of a few large, feature-heavy releases only once or twice a year.

Agile is certainly a trend, following on the heels of Extreme Programming and iterative development. As one of the leaders of our Billing Manager team, to me it means we walk a balanced line between releasing new features and UI experiences as fast as we can; but without any significant loss of quality or degradation of features. We achieve this via the following steps:

• Take on a smaller chunk of work for easier manageability. Prioritize and limit the work for each sprint to focus on specific customer needs. We want the chunk to be no more than 2-4 weeks of development work, so that we are continuously enhancing the usefulness of the site.
• In our software development processes, we follow best practices to ensure that our product remains stable.
• And here is a key: overlap the Quality Assurance work so that it is not all back-end scheduled.
• The last part is getting constant feedback from our users to measure how we are doing. We have a Feedback page, email address, customer council meetings, and host usability sessions to provide a measurement. We use a QuickBase application to analyze and categorize the results.

Billing Manager development process

Small teams are critical to the success of agile projects.

Because we’re small, we can move fast, and we have the freedom granted from our leaders to innovate and take risks.

Intuit executives are passionate about us delivering something good quickly – and doing so sometimes means we “fail”, which is ok. And not just fail, but fail fast. So our goal is to get new features out quickly to see if they meet customer needs, while keeping things simple. Sometimes they don’t, and we learn. Other times, they take off and we know we’re on the right track, without a huge time investment. Rapid experiments help us make progress quickly.

What does Agile mean to you? Who do you think is good at it?

Intuit Billing Manager has just joined the ranks of Twitter madness. We’ll be using it to update you on what we’re working on, how we’re feeling, or just general craziness in our offices. Twitter can give you up to the minute status on our latest Tweets. I just love that word.

A lot of you must be on Twitter too, if so, feel free to hit us up at our Twitter page and we’ll follow you back.

We’re always thirsty for feedback here on the Billing Manager team, and are constantly actively recruiting new members to join the Billing Manager Customer Council. We take the feedback we receive really seriously. After all, we’re here to serve our users, so if we’re not making your lives easier, we’re not doing our jobs!

If you’re interested in joining, leave a comment on this post and I’ll contact you about next steps.

What you’ll get for joining:

• Direct access to the folks at Intuit who work on Billing Manager
• Influencing new features while they’re still in development
• Crafting the vision for Billing Manager going forward
• The ability to influence a product you love! (ok, even if you only like it now, we hope you’ll grow to love it after working with us)

What we ask from you in return:

• Commit 6 months to helping our team out
• Spend about 1-2 hours a month working with us and giving feedback

Sound like a deal? Join the Council! Don’t worry, no sword play necessary.

Many of our users mentioned a need to send estimates to their customers. Although there were many similarities in their needs, there were also several differences in how they handled their estimating process. To address this we decided not to build a rigid work flow into the estimate feature, hopefully allowing you the flexibility to work the way you want.

Here is one of the ways we see the estimate feature being used. Let’s say you need to create an estimate for a customer so you click the Estimates link on the left side of your screen. This opens the estimate folder where you can view you existing estimates or create a new one. You click on the Create an Estimate link, that will bring up the Create an Estimate screen.

Similar to an invoice, there is an estimate number field that is automatically populated which you can change if you’d like. We added a status drop down to allow you to control the work flow of the estimate, more on that in a minute. And, we’ve added an optional expiration date field. With the exception of the private notes field in the Products & Services and Estimate Notes sections, everything is basically the same as creating an invoice.

After filling in the estimate details, you can e-mail the estimate by clicking the Send by E-mail button. As with invoices, this will send an e-mail to your customer notifying them that the estimate is ready for their review. When the estimate is sent, the status will change from “Draft” to “Open (Waiting)”. The e-mail they get will look something like this:

After your customer reviews and approves (or declines) the estimate, you will be sent an e-mail. The next time you log into Billing Manager you will also see a message in the Since Your Last Visit area letting you know that the estimate was approved. At this point the status of the invoice has been automatically set to “Open (Approved)”.

When you’re ready to invoice, simply click the Convert to an Invoice link. That will update the status of the estimate to “Invoiced” and copy all of the relevant information from your estimate, creating a new invoice. In the history section of the invoice you will see an entry letting you know which estimate was used to generate the invoice.

There is a similar entry in the estimate history showing you the invoice number that was created.

Now, lets say that estimate was to cut you customers lawn and you now need to invoice them for the second cut. One way to do that is by going to the original estimate and using the Convert to an Invoice link. Even though you’ve already converted the estimate once, you can convert it as many times as you need to.

Getting back to that status drop down on the estimate page. Notice that it is editable and that you can change the value at any time. One thing that we attempted to do is have the value automatically set to right value at the right time. If your needs are different, go ahead an change the status. For example, if you like to paper mail your estimates instead of e-mailing them, you can print the estimate, mail it, and manually set the status to “Open (Waiting)”. If you don’t like setting an expiration date on your estimates, don’t. But, if enough time has passed an you no longer want the estimate in an “Open (Waiting)” status, change the status to “Expired”.

We hope that this new feature works for you. If it does, please let us know. If it doesn’t, please let us know. If it kind-of works for you, please let us know. Basically, we’d love to hear any feedback you have so we can improve this feature to better meet your estimating needs.

Hello again,

I wanted to take a quick moment to share some of the benefits of JumpUp.com, Intuit’s small-business community. JumpUp is a really great place to go to find answers to your business questions, and I think it can be a valuable resource for Billing Manager users.

So without further ado, I’d like to present the Top 5 Reasons to join JumpUp.com:

5. Signing up is Easy & Free

Similar to Billing Manager, JumpUp makes it easy to get started, and doesn’t cost anything to use. With a quick signup you’re able to get access to all that JumpUp has to offer.

4. Review Steps for Starting and Growing your Business

JumpUp has organized lots of business fundamentals information, with categories such as “Business Planning” and “Marketing 101”. So whether you’re learning for the first time or just want to brush up, you know where to go.

3. Find Free Tools and Services

You can find out about great business tools and services here as well – and many of them are free. From business cards to web design, there’s a lot of stuff to help you with your business tasks.

2. Expand your Online Presence and Gain Visibility

Signing up and participating on JumpUp can help your business in a lot of ways. For one, you can create a profile that tells other visitors about your business. And if you have a website you can add that to your profile as well, which can help improve your website’s ranking in search engine results (some users have reported huge boosts in their website’s ranking).

JumpUp also allows you to submit your business for a Homepage Spotlight where you and your business could be showcased on JumpUp’s homepage.

And just interacting on the community will allow more individuals to find out about your business, which brings us to #1 in our list…

1. Connect and Converse with Small-Business Owners like You

JumpUp is a community of people who have a diverse range of skills and experiences. What unites them is their shared passion for their business. Find people based on industry, location, or areas of interest . JumpUp offers you a place to meet these individuals, share ideas, and receive support when needed.

And there are a number of topics for users to discuss various issues relating to their business. The JumpUp team has even created a Getting Paid topic specifically for questions about invoicing, billing, and collecting.

Plus, you can easily access JumpUp from within Billing Manager by clicking the “Help & Support” tab.

So why not give JumpUp a shot, and see if it’s useful to you?

Take care,
Colin

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.

Hey Billing Manager crowd. We just updated Billing Manager on April 30th, and we’re really excited to present you with some cool new features.

We’ve reworked the email sending experience, so you’ll now see a dialog box when you click “Send by Email”. This should save you some time if you don’t need to customize the email.

And for those of you who send invoices through the post office, be sure to check out the new “Windowed Envelope” invoice style.

Any Safari users out there? If so, you’ll now find that Billing Manager works on Safari!

By clicking the “Help & Support” link up top, you can now access the new “Getting Paid” message board, hosted by JumpUp, Intuit’s Small Business Community. We invite you to check it out and share your experiences with other small business owners.

Billing Manager has made its first step towards mobile with our new iPhone-optimized product. Just go to www.billingmanager.com on an iPhone and you’ll be taken there automatically. Check out our iPhone blog post for more info.

We also have a couple of enhancements for our Merchant Service subscribers. You can now access what we call the “QuickBooks Merchant Center” through the Payment Methods tab within Settings. Here you have easy access to information related to transactions, deposits, and fees. Also, check out the new SMS notification feature which will allow you to receive a text message on your phone when a customer pays for an invoice online.

We hope you enjoy the new features, but we’d rather hear in your own words what you think. If you have any feedback for us feel free to comment to this blog article or click on our “Feedback” link.

Take care,
Colin

We’ve made a lot of changes in the most recent release of Billing Manager, but the one I’m most excited about is our new iPhone-optimized site. As cell phones become more powerful–and better designed–the way people work is going to adapt, and we wanted to take a first step in learning how Billing Manager users want to work on the go.

Getting to the iPhone version of Billing Manager is easy: just go to billingmanager.com on your iPhone. We think the application is simple and straight-forward, but I’ll quickly go over the main features and show some screen shots for readers without an iPhone.

Once you sign in, you get the My Account page, which provides a summmary of your invoice folders. From this page, you find customers in your address book, see your account’s recent activity, or look at the contents of each invoice folder.

Address Book is a list of organizations and individuals from your Billing Manager address book. Tapping on a entry brings up a page with contact details and buttons for mapping or calling the contact.

Recent Activity shows you what’s happened with your Billing Manager account…recently. Specifically, it shows a list of the ten most recently paid invoices or invoices that have become overdue.

Each of the invoice folders contain lists of invoices. If you click on one of the invoices, you’ll see a summary page for that invoice. If an invoice is unpaid, you can record a payment from an invoice detail page.

If an invoice is unpaid, you can tap the Record Payment button and record the receipt of cash, check, money order, any form of payment Billing Manager supports–including credit cards if your are signed up for QuickBooks Merchant Service. That means that you can now accept credit card payments from your iPhone. We are very excited to offer our customers this feature.

That’s about it for the what Billing Manager for the iPhone can do. I’d like to mention a couple of things it can’t. Specifically, you can’t create invoices or view the items on an invoice. We decided to release this initial version of the product with these limitation for a couple of reasons. First, practically speaking, we wanted to get something out for you to use as soon as possible, so some things had to wait. But more importantly, we weren’t sure that 1) our users want to create invoices on their iPhones or that 2) even if they do, we wanted to design an interface optimized for the iPhone’s interface, which is a challenge given how large and complicated Billing Manager’s invoice page is.

So, all you iPhone-owning Billing Manager users, I encourage you to check out the latest release. As I said above, we’ve introduced version of the product to help us learn. What you love, what you hate, the features that you never use, the features you’re dying to see.

One of our guiding principles in building Billing Manager was “help the user get & stay organized”. With that as one of core philosophies - we thought “why don’t we help the user by keeping track of an invoice’s ’state’ - draft, unpaid, overdue…we can take care of it, and it’s one less thing for the user to do”. The last thing we wanted users doing was having to remember to move invoices between folders. So here is an explanation of when and why we move invoices between folders…

1. You save a Draft: When you save a new invoice we put it in the Drafts folder. Our thinking was the Drafts folder is where invoices would live that had not been sent to customers.

2. We move it to Unpaid folder: When you email or print an invoice (a new invoice, or one in the Drafts folder) we move it to the Unpaid folder. Our thinking was if you’re emailing or printing the invoice, then it’s being delivered to the customer.

3. We move it to Paid folder: When your customer pays, our expectation is you’ll record that payment in Billing Manager. When the invoice is paid in full (that is, the recorded payments in Billing Manager are equal to the total amount of the invoice) we move it to the paid folder. I make the distinction about being paid in full because Billing Manager is perfectly happy if you record partial payments - we’ll simply keep track of what is owed (and the invoice will continue to live in the Unpaid folder).

FYI - you can’t record payments against a draft invoice - because our theory is you haven’t delivered it to the customer yet.

4. We move it to Overdue folder: If it’s past the due date on the invoice, and the invoice is not paid in full, we put it in the Overdue folder (and it will still be in the unpaid folder - so you can see everything that’s unpaid (including overdue) in one place).

So, what do you think? Will this logic work for you? So far it seems like most users have appreciated us taking care of this - one less thing to manage in that quest for business organization.

Heather

Our number one goal with Billing Manager is to make a product that our customers love. We understand that in order to deliver on that goal we must also create a product that works for our customers’ customers (the individuals who receive Billing Manager Invoices). If you’re interested in seeing what your customers experience with Billing Manager, then this article is for you

For this example, we’re going to walk through the end-customer experience. We’ve recently done business with our friend Jason Brenner, who has just emailed us an invoice for the computer repair work that he performed (the fire sprinkler went off in our office and destroyed our PC – uhg!). Here’s the invoice in our inbox:

Now we want to check out the invoice to see what we were charged for. We click the link to go to the invoice page:

A Note on Tracking: One of the ways Billing Manager helps users manage their invoices is by tracking “History” information, including when a customer views and prints and invoice online. All of this tracking can be seen within the “unpaid” folder, by clicking the “History” button.

We click “View and Print Invoice” to open the invoice.

Those prices look correct. At the bottom of the page we find the remittance slip, which we can tear off and submit with our payment…

Now, suppose Jason Brenner had signed up for Billing Manager’s integrated Credit Card Processing Service so he can accept credit cards. When we click the invoice link in our email, we will come to this page:

Now, we have the option to pay by credit card. Jason has done a good job fixing our computer, so let’s go ahead and pay him now.

Once completed, we’ve paid our invoice online.

Fast and easy invoicing…for your customers too!

Take care,
Colin