We know from our customer research that a lot of you are web designers using Billing Manager to invoice your clients. The Billing Manager team just found a cool tool from google that offers a quick and dirty analysis of your website through the eyes of your customers. Check it out.
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
Any other tools you want to share with your fellow web design community?
A couple of you folks have been reporting that you’re getting a white screen when you try to log in to Billing Manager. There is a quick way for you to fix that.
1. Just clear your cache and cookies (follow the article’s directions)
2. Close all your open windows in that browser
3. Try again.
Wait, wait, how do I clear my cache and cookies? Great question. This article explains it pretty clearly. Let us know if you have questions.
How to clear cache and cookies?
Bermster
All this time we thought “Hello” was the one universal language that people spoke. No, no, no. There is a second. It’s called getting paid. Billing Manager has had visits from over 100 countries, using over 60 languages in just the last month!
As you know, there is a universal need to collect money for the services and products that you sell. And the currencies, which enable this, have been around since the Mesopotamian times. The face of it has changed from silver, gold, coins to paper money and so have the many symbols which represent them.
We’re excited to announce that today…Billing Manager has taken its first step to become universal. We are including currency symbols in the product. Your invoice will now represent your currency. We have over 100 in the product, hopefully you’ll find yours!
How do I set this up?
It’s easy! Just go to your settings tab and change the currency. Almost every country has its own symbol, its own fractional unit, currency separators and formatting. We’ve spent a lot of time ensuring these show up correctly and in all browsers.
In the comments, say HI and let us know what country you are from!
If you are US based and this currency update doesn’t apply to you, we are continously looking for product feedback. In addition, we’ll have one more release before the Holidays, so more stuff is coming!
Thanks everyone for your patience. , During the recent downtime we successfully stepped up our game. We hope you enjoy the more tuned up Billing Manager!
The team is working hard and fast to make these maintenance updates successful. We’ll let you know when things have completed. But in the meantime…here are 10 things you can do while you wait!
1. Increase your reoccurring invoices and thus your profit. Learn how here.
2. Call a customer just to see how they are doing. If you wait for customers to call you it’s like giving a 2 year old a can of red paint and putting them in a white room alone. When you check back later, you never know what surprise you are going to get!
3. Start using twitter and say hi to us. Your customers are on it, so should you be. Create an account and then update your status with 140 characters. Use @IntuitInvoice in your update to tell us hello! We’ll start following you back!
4. Relax. When your head is full with a to-do list your creativity decreases. (Proven fact! at least on the Billing Manager team). Take an hour and go for a walk, get inspired and energize
5. Check out the new Intuit App Center. This contains lots of business apps that help you run your business better. Most of them have free trials (and some are even completely free!!). Examples include web conferencing, email marketing, expense management.
6. Participate in the Love a Local Business campaign. This monthly contest awards local business big money just having loyal customers. Submit a story about your favorite local business (or get your customers to submit on behalf of you!).
7. Spend money. Yes, it may sound counter-intuitive but keep listening. If a new customer brings you $100 of new revenue…then you should totally fine paying up to $99 to get them in the door. (Now hopefully you pay a lot less than $99, but as a business just starting out, getting customers is the first task you have in front of you!)
8. Be inspired. Watch David Weekly (founder of PBwiki) talk about how to give your ideas ex-lax. It’s a funny and motivating talk!
9. Zen your desk. With a clean and pristine environment you can be more effective and organized. Take 20 minutes…dust it out.
10. Comment on this blog. What other things did you do today?
Some times you just need to take a little break. When you get super busy and stressed out, it’s healthy to take time to yourself, stretch, meditate and regroup. Billing Manager is about to take one of those breaks.
On December 5th we’ll be down from 8am PST to 5pm PST. This is a long time and we apologize for the inconvenience.
During that break, we’re taking steps to ensure we don’t have to go on break again. As counter intuitive as that may sound, the team is working hard to ensure that our performance and uptime is best in class. To make that happen, there is a one time tradeoff off for an extended period to rejuvenate. (We’re basically giving the app a boutique style spa treatment).
But wait…it gets better! We’ll also be releasing some highly requested features! You asked for it and we’re delivering.
But you’ll have to wait until Dec 6th to find out what these features are. I know, we can’t wait to tell you either!
Thanks again for your patience. We appreciate it.
Hello world.
My name is Brian and I have been on the Billing Manager team for three months now. I finished my degree at Cal (GO BEARS!) this past spring.
When I graduated, a lot of things stopped:
Thankfully, my passion to make applications of technology more available to people has not suffered the same fate!
I’ve had some intense college projects, but this is my first time on a project that impacts the daily lives of so many different people. There is no longer an ideal solution. Each Billing Manager customer wants something different and the challenge is finding the best solution.
To do this, I make several designs for the same page or feature and track how many users access each one. Using the data driven tracking mechanisms along with customer councils, I can tell which design is the most popular and scrap the other ones. It’s a great feeling to find out what customers want and then give it to them.
Making Billing Manager run faster is another important piece of my work. Time is money. You know that, we know that. To give you more time in your day, we have been working on algorithms to speed up Billing Manager. To do this, we:
This may sound complicated but the concept is pretty simple. Imagine you and your friend are talking. We’re talking it from slow motion to speed talking!
I am having a lot of fun using technology to create the best customer experience possible. Stay tuned to check out the cool new work that we’re rolling out very soon.
Hello world.
My name is Brian and I have been on the Billing Manager team for three months now. I finished my degree at Cal (GO BEARS!) this past spring.
When I graduated, a lot of things stopped:
Thankfully, my passion to make applications of technology more available to people has not suffered the same fate!
I’ve had some intense college projects, but this is my first time on a project that impacts the daily lives of so many different people. There is no longer an ideal solution. Each Billing Manager customer wants something different and the challenge is finding the best solution.
To do this, I make several designs for the same page or feature and track how many users access each one. Using the data driven tracking mechanisms along with customer councils, I can tell which design is the most popular and scrap the other ones. It’s a great feeling to find out what customers want and then give it to them.
Making Billing Manager run faster is another important piece of my work. Time is money. You know that, we know that. To give you more time in your day, we have been working on algorithms to speed up Billing Manager. To do this, we:
This may sound complicated but the concept is pretty simple. Imagine you and your friend are talking. We’re talking it from slow motion to speed talking!
I am having a lot of fun using technology to create the best customer experience possible. Stay tuned to check out the cool new work that we’re rolling out very soon.
So I’m the new kid on the team. Just joined last week as the new product manager for Billing Manager. I have to admit…I couldn’t be more excited. My job description is to ‘Help new small businesses succeed.’ It can’t get much better than that.
And why, you may wonder, is that so appealing? (And if you weren’t wondering, I still implore you to keep reading, this won’t take long).
A while back I started a small business. It was computer service for the technically un-savey. Things went well for about a year and I really enjoyed it. I worked hard and the team helped a lot of customers fix their computers. But at the end of the day, the company just wasn’t pulling in the money. We had to shut it down.
Retrospectively, I learned a lot. The operations weren’t built to scale, my larger customers were taking too much time away from the bread and butter business, the people I hired were good, not great. There’s probably 10 other reasons why we failed that I didn’t mention. Maybe 20. Starting a business is hard stuff. There isn’t a manual to help you do it. YOU get to write the manual every day. Which is admittedly a fun and exciting challenge! But it’s not easy.
Which brings us back to my current job description. ‘Help new small businesses succeed.’
As the product manager for Billing Manager, I’m not just here to ensure this is the easiest invoicing solution out there (although that is a goal!). At the end of this day, the team is here and Billing Manager exists to help make your business succeed.
In light of that vision, we’ll start sharing some ‘help my business succeed’ tips here on the blog. These will be bitesize pieces of knowledge that will hopefully be not only useful but also motivating.
Feel free to suggest and share your bitesize tips and tricks for others in the comments of any post! Looking forward to hearing from you.
Bermster
Twitter: @freeinvoicing
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First Bitesize bit: Business plans are sometimes most useful for the purpose of clarifying your vision. You can be the primary consumer of your business plan, not the investor. It’s just like shooting a free throw, you want to visualize making the basket before the ball is out of your hands. Business plans are just a visualization of you making the shot. Start visualizing.
http://community.intuit.com/library/articles/elements_business_plan
Attention all users…we’re having a contest! From all of our interactions with you, we know that you are all highly creative and innovative people, and we here on the Billing Manager team have been thinking of ways to bring it out throughout the product. Well, one thing that Billing Manager has always been lacking is an awesome logo. We want the logo to represent all of the extraordinary and dedicated users who use Billing Manager; so what better way than to have you guys design it yourself!?
So, we’re having a contest on who can design the best Billing Manager logo. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be an artist or a designer to enter, just be creative, give it some meaning, and if you’ve got any semblance of an idea, go for it! The winner of the contest will have their logo used for anything Billing Manager (e.g. marketing, ads, tshirts, etc), and your company will be featured on the Billing Manager blog. Talk about publicity! Here are the details:
The team is excited to see what you’ve got! Good luck!
(Brian Tran is a software engineer on the Billing Manager team. He hopes to one day own a restaurant called Bubbo’s, serving different kinds of comfort food from around the world.)
*all rules are subject to change
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