It’s been a quick four weeks since I started working as the product marketer for Billing Manager.  I’ve been busy with a lot of different things ranging from building out the development roadmap with our engineers to answering some tech support requests (we also play tricks on Dan, my boss’s boss’s boss).  What has given me the most energy over the last month, however, has been talking with customers and working to understand how we can make Billing Manager better.  That’s why I created the Customer Council, a way for us to have a dialog with customers.

Our Customer Council event will be next week on Tuesday, July 7th.   If you signed up for the Customer Council via replying to this post, I have already contacted you about this opportunity, but if you haven’t, please reply to the post and also grab some time on our calendar for July 7th.

Here’s how you can reserve a spot:
1. Follow this link to see my calendar. The calendar is called Jiffle and is web-based scheduling tool. Click here: http://www.jifflenow.com/grp/Will_Hambly
2. Navigate to July 7th, where you can see 30 minute slots from 1PM to 5PM Pacific time available.
3. Go ahead and set up a meeting through the tool (please only 30 minute meetings)
4. I will provide a dial-in number for the meeting.

I haven’t used Jiffle before, but so far it’s working great, so also let me know what you think about the calendar tool and if I should use it again.  Looking forward to our conversation!

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.

1. 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?
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

In the last week, I’ve immersed myself in customer feedback, reading and replying to your thoughts, opinions, ideas, and complaints.  The team and I have spoken with a handful of customers over the phone and we’re going to continue to do this for one very simple reason: you’re the boss.
We have a ton of requests and things to work on that have been submitted through the “Feedback” button in the product, but we want to hear more from you—that’s why we’re recruiting customers for our new Customer Council.

What you’ll get for joining the Customer Council:

1. Direct access to the folks at Intuit who work on Billing Manager
2. Influence over new features and design while they’re still in development
3. Input into the vision for Billing Manager going forward

What we ask from you in return:

1. Commit 6 months to helping our team out
2. Spend about an hour a month working with us and giving feedback (this could be over email, phone, or in person)
3. Share your honest opinions and thoughts

Sound like a good deal?  Reply to this post and I’ll reach out to arrange our first meeting.

If you’re a Mac user, you probably already know this, but last night and today we’ve been experiencing some issues with the Safari 4 web browser.  I’ve been hearing from customers via the Feedback button that some pages in the product aren’t loading or that it looks like invoices have disappeared.  These problems are isolated to the Safari 4 browser, so rest assured, your data and invoices are still safe.

Our quality guru, Mehul, is heading up an investigation into the best ways to fix this problem.  We apologize for the issue, and while the team is fixing it, the best work around is to access Billing Manager with Mozilla’s Firefox browser.  Mehul and I will give you an update once this is fixed or when we have more information.

Update 4:45PM: I just spoke with quality extraordinaire Mehul.  He’s done some extensive testing across different browsers and operating systems to get to the bottom of this problem.   Mehul notes that  “objects either don’t appear at all, or the page is rendered only partially and existing links do not work.   A quick fix in most cases is to refresh the page in Safari.”  I don’t have an exact time for when we should have these issues all hammered out, but again, your data is safe and we’re working on the browser issue.

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!

Have you noticed? Billing Manager is sporting a fresh new look! Last night, developers not only spiffed up the site but delivered one of your most-requested features. Also, you can save time and money by taking advantage of new special deals our team is offering.

New Look
Site pages got a facelift, but Billing Manager workflow hasn’t changed. You’ll find your favorite features and links in the same place, with one minor exception. The Billing Manager menu has moved from the right side of the screen to the left (though the Sign Out link remains on the right).

New menu location

Options that lie underneath this menu and elsewhere in Billing Manager remain the same. They just may look a bit different.

New Feature
Lots of you have requested the ability to create and email PDF files. Now you can! Email PDF invoices or estimates as attachments and provide clients with their own electronic copy. You’re also able to save PDF files for your own records too. PDF generation is a premium feature. Haven’t yet signed up for Premium? Read on to learn about our special upgrade offer.

Special Offers
Billing Manager is offering new premium users a price cut. Upgrade to Premium and save half off the monthly fee. New Premium subscribers pay only $4.95 a month (reduced from the regular price of $9.95).

Looking for an even better deal? If you sign up to take credit card and eCheck payments with Merchant Service for Billing Manager, you pay nothing for Premium service. A merchant service account (a monthly fee of $14.95) includes a premium subscription and all its great features! Try this add on service now, and we’ll waive the $14.95 for the first month. Sign up.

There’s never been a better time to take advantage of all Billing Manager has to offer.

If you use Billing Manager to run your remodeling/renovation business, we’d love to hear from you. We want to chat about how you’re using Billing Manager and get your feedback on the site. What’s in it for you? Our eternal thanks, a better Billing Manager, and the chance that your business may be featured in a published article.

If you’re interested, please leave a comment on this post, and we’ll contact you.

Thanks!

It’s been a while since you’ve heard from the Billing Manager Team. Apologies. We’ve neglected the blog for a bit, but we have a good excuse! The team has been hard at work, improving Billing Manager.

Soon the site will have a few new features and a spiffy new look for 2009. I’ll publish another post with more details next week. Meanwhile, stay tuned. Enhancements coming soon!

Happy Holidays!

I wanted to post a quick note to let everyone know that PC Magazine gave Billing Manager a great review last week. The reviewer, Kathy Yakal, who specializes in small business accounting software, highlights the simplicity and ease of Billing Manager when compared with more complex and expensive programs. She says that Billing Manager is “an exceptionally clean, well-designed site that makes billing faster and easier.”

We were pleased that she truly understands Billing Manager’s mission. Not everyone needs the full accounting features that come with QuickBooks. Billing Manager is tailor-made for the small business that just wants to send out invoices and keep track of who owes what. And, like the best things in life, Billing Manager is free. Unlimited invoicing at no cost to you. Ho! Ho! Ho!

Read the PC Magazine review.

MyCorporation (owned by Intuit), is offering free incorporation for new businesses through Dec. 5th.  Check out this link:

http://mycorporation.intuit.com/commerce/catalog/category.jsp?categoryId=cat0000000000006337274

Got a question about Billing Manager? Is it one of the top questions in this screen shot?

Billing Manager Help Home Page

If so, or if you have any other questions, check out Billing Manager Help. It’s chock full of information. To access Help, click the Billing Manager menu’s Help & Support link

A recent psychological study of user assistance found that people associate negative emotions with the act of clicking the Help link. I suspect that’s because by the time they click Help, they’re frustrated. Don’t let it get to that point. Check Help as soon as a question pops in your mind. If you can’t find the answer, please let us know by submitting feedback. We want to know how you’re using Billing Manager and are always looking to improve the product to better meet your needs.

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?