Spa treatment for Billing Manager – Dec 5th: 8am to 5pm PST

Posted December 1, 2009 by Bermster
Categories: Uncategorized

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.

Comments: 11 Comments

New Billing Manager engineer trades hip hop ringtones for coding

Posted December 1, 2009 by pestyfly
Categories: Billing Manager News, Customer Learning, Development Process

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:

  1. Skateboarding indoors
  2. Showing up to meetings 10 minutes late
  3. The 5 for 5 deal at Domino’s Pizza
  4. Ringtones featuring hip hop artists.

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:

  1. Get user information from our databases faster
  2. Send our pages to your browser faster
  3. Format those pages so that your browser can interpret it faster

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.

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New Billing Manager engineer trades hip hop ringtones for coding

Posted November 25, 2009 by Bermster
Categories: Billing Manager News, Customer Learning, Development Process

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:

  1. Skateboarding indoors
  2. Showing up to meetings 10 minutes late
  3. The 5 for 5 deal at Domino’s Pizza
  4. Ringtones featuring hip hop artists.

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:

  1. Get user information from our databases faster
  2. Send our pages to your browser faster
  3. Format those pages so that your browser can interpret it faster

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.

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Introductions, a virtual handshake.

Posted November 7, 2009 by Bermster
Categories: Billing Manager News, Bitesize tips and tricks

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

—–

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

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Billing Manager Issues

Posted September 18, 2009 by Will Hambly
Categories: Billing Manager News

Update (9:32AM 9/18/2009): We’ve fixed the performance issue and Billing Manager should be running as normal.  This means you should be having no trouble logging into your account and should be able to process your invoicing and payments like you have always done before.  Our team will also be introducing some improvements that we expect will make Billing Manager run even faster.  Our team is watching this issue very closely but if you have a concern or problem, let us know.

9/10: Billing Manager is currently having some performance issues and is running very slow in some key areas.  We know how many people rely on Billing Manager to invoice their clients and accept payments, so this is a serious problem.  Our team has been investigating the root cause of this issue, I am confident they will get to a solution soon.  Thanks for bearing with us and we will give you an update when we have more information.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience and will get Billing Manager running smoothly as soon as possible.

Billing Manager is currently having some performance issues and is running very slow in some key areas.  We know how many people rely on Billing Manager to invoice their clients and accept payments, so this is a serious problem.  Our team has been investigating the root cause of this issue, I am confident they will get  to a solution soon.  Thanks for bearing with us and we will give you an update when we have more information.
We’re sorry for the inconvenience and will get Billing Manager running smoothly as soon as possible.

Comments: 3 Comments

Phishing email is not from Intuit

Posted September 16, 2009 by Will Hambly
Categories: Billing Manager News

We are currently investigating fraudulent emails that were sent to some Billing Manager customers over the past few days. The email requests users to update their account information by clicking a link that goes to a fraudulent web site or may download what the email indicates is a “security tool.”  Intuit did not send this email–we never use emails to request personal information or update security tools. A copy of the e-mail is pasted below should you want to refer to it.

Here’s what you should do to protect yourself:

  1. Be suspicious of any email that asks for personal information, requires you to download anything or requests your authentication information to access your online account.
  2. Do not click any links in a suspicious email.
  3. Do not download any tools from an email
  4. Delete any suspicious email from your inbox and your trash bin immediately
  5. If you have downloaded any programs related to the fraudulent email, delete them.  If you have provided any personal information, passwords, or logins, change your password to prevent unauthorized users from logging into your account.
Be suspicious of any email that asks for personal information, requires you to download anything or requests your authentication information to access your online account.
Do not click any links in a suspicious email.
Do not download any tools from an email
Delete any suspicious email from your inbox and your trash bin immediately
If you have downloaded any programs related to the fraudulent email, delete them.  If you have provided any personal information, passwords, or logins, change your password to prevent unauthorized users from logging into your account.

Below is the fraudulent email for your reference:

Subject: NECESSARY TOOL

Body: Due to increased security measures our company developed a tool for secured access to the web-page. You should follow these instructions:

- download the tool click here

- install it on your personal computer

In case you don’t install this tool within two weeks from the moment of receiving this letter you will be denied access to services provided by our company.

We are here to support. We want to do everything we can to get you up and running. To contact us, or to view Frequently Asked Questions, please click here. Going forward, you can also click support at the bottom of any page or call us at 800-624-1465. (Don’t respond to this email; it was sent from an address that can’t accept incoming email.)

Best regards,

The Intuit Online team

The Intuit Security Team is investigating this message–please visit http://security.intuit.com/ if you have more concerns or would like more information.

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Can you find yourself on the map?

Posted August 28, 2009 by Will Hambly
Categories: Social

Where do Billing Manager customers come from?  One of the cool tools the Billing Manager team uses to understand how customers use our website is a free app called Google Analytics.  It’s a really useful tool that helps us measure how many visits we’re getting to our website, the source of those visits, and even where our users are coming from geographically.  If your business has a website and isn’t already using Google Analytics, it’s worth taking a look.  Google Analytics will even tell you what keywords people type into search engines to find your site.  One of the fun features is the geo-visualization.  Can you spot yourself ?

The darker green areas mean that more free invoicing users are coming from that region.

map-world

map

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Billing Manager is now completely free

Posted August 11, 2009 by Will Hambly
Categories: Billing Manager News
Billing Manager is the only completely free web invoicing solution–and tonight free got even better.  We’re committed to making Billing Manager the invoicing solution of choice for small businesses, and with our latest product changes, we’re taking a pretty big step in that direction.  We’ve made Estimates, Recurring Invoices, and PDF functionality completely free to all our free users.  It’s no secret that there are plenty of invoicing apps out there—it’s actually a pretty crowded space, but one thing sets us apart from the pack—Billing Manager is free for any number of clients you have, any number of invoices you send, and now we have some great new features available to you.
Here’s what’s new in Billing Manager:
Recurring Invoices: If you regularly send the same invoice to a particular client, you can now schedule it with Billing Manager, helping save you time.
Estimates: If you want to create estimates before billing your customers, you can have your customer approve an estimate and then convert it to an invoice.
PDF’s: Our PDF feature is now available to all.  This lets you save invoices as a PDF and send them as PDF attachments to your clients.
Payments & Sales Tax Report: A lot of our existing customers have told us that they’d like to add up the total amount that their customers have paid them for a certain time period.  Our new report solves this problem and is combined with our Sales Tax Report.
We still offer Intuit Merchant Service for Billing Manager if you need to accept credit cards, and nothing has changed here—there is still a monthly fee and associated transaction charges.  If are currently signed up for our Premium Account, we will stop billing you.  Cheers!

send invoiceBilling Manager is a completely free web invoicing solution–and tonight free got even better!  We’re committed to making Billing Manager the invoicing solution of choice for small businesses, and with our latest product changes, we’re taking a pretty big step in that direction.  We’ve made Estimates, Recurring Invoices, and PDF functionality completely free to all our users.  It’s no secret that there are plenty of invoicing apps out there—it’s actually a pretty crowded space, but one thing sets us apart from the pack—Billing Manager is free for any number of clients you have, any number of invoices you send, and now we have some other great new features available.

Here’s what’s new in Billing Manager:

  • Recurring Invoices: If you regularly send the same invoice to a particular client, you can now schedule it with Billing Manager, helping save you time.
  • Estimates: If you want to create estimates before billing your customers, you can have your customer approve an estimate and then convert it to an invoice.
  • PDF’s: Our PDF feature is now available to all.  This lets you save invoices as a PDF and send them as PDF attachments to your clients.
  • Payments & Sales Tax Report: A lot of our existing customers have told us that they’d like to add up the total amount that their customers have paid them for a certain time period.  Our new report solves this problem and is combined with our Sales Tax Report.

We still offer Intuit Merchant Service for Billing Manager if you need to accept credit cards, and nothing has changed here—there is still a monthly fee and associated transaction charges.  If you are currently signed up for our Premium Account, we will stop billing you.  Cheers!

Comments: 9 Comments

Do you send invoices and track time? Meet TimeCatcher.

Posted July 31, 2009 by Will Hambly
Categories: Uncategorized

Many of our customers are professionals who bill for their time and use Billing Manager to invoice their clients when the work is complete.  Our Intuit Labs team created a mobile application called TimeCatcher that automatically detects and saves time spent on calls with customers.  Right now it works on the Blackberry.  With TimeCatcher you can easily add completed appointments to your digital timesheet.  At the moment, it doesn’t work with Billing Manager directly, but TimeCatcher lets you can export your digital timesheet to spreadsheet format where you can copy and paste into Billing Manager.  Check it out TimeCatcher.

blackberry

Comments: 3 Comments

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