This was a feature that many of you have requested, but we didn’t want to rush it and gave it some time to mature enough before we started with the implementation. As you already know partial payments could be made in Invoicebus only if the invoice payment was manually recorded within the app.

But this wasn’t the case with the online payments. If you wanted to receive online payments, your client needed to pay the whole invoice amount. We knew sometimes this can make your clients feel uncomfortable, and sometimes even frustrated. So we wanted to make the online payments more flexible and decided to introduce the partial online payments.

The best part is, with the partial online payments, it will be easier for your clients to pay you back. This will for sure incentivize the client to pay you promptly and iInstead of paying one big amount they can split it in a more comfortable smaller amounts. Yay to building great client relationships.

Enabling partial payments

The partial online payments are enabled on per invoice basis. As you can see now in the invoice editor, in the “Payment Options” section at the bottom you’ll notice the “Enable partial payments” checkbox. To enable partial payments, the only thing you need to do is, check this box and save your invoice. Ta-da, now you can receive partial payments for that invoice.

And this is what your clients will see when they’ll click on the payment buttons on the invoice preview page. For convinience here’s displayed the basic info about the invoice, the payee (your company name) and the total, paid and due amounts.

Note that the partial payments functionality is unified and work for both Credit Card and PayPal payments. After entering the amount, the payment flow continues same as before.

We know this is one more step in the payment process, so if you don’t need partial payments you can go back to the old payment way, which requires payment of the whole amount. You can even combine the two of them for different invoices.

Bonus: Improved payments reversal

The way the old payment reversal worked was by removing the payment record without any prompting. And if you undo some payment it will be gone for good. This is a serious operation, so to prevent accidents we added a new layer of protection with a confirmation dialog box.

Also instead of removing the payment record we decided to keep it and added a new “Reversed payment” note for that invoice.

This way you can keep complete payments log for your invoices, see how much is paid and how much is reversed.

Next, we have some interesting ideas for Invoicebus on our minds, but let that be a surprise.

Top photo credit: Got Credit

Author information

Dimitar Stojanov

Co-founder at Invoicebus

Dimitar is co-founder of Invoicebus, an online invoicing tool for easy invoice management. He's passionate about creating beautiful and simple web applications and occasionally writes on this blog about web design, online business, and fighting the status-quo. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

| Twitter | Facebook | Google+ |

The post Partial payments in Invoicebus appeared first on Garage.

The idea for custom invoice templates in Invoicebus was on our minds even from the early days. We wanted to make Invoicebus in a way that everyone will be able to customize their invoice design and layout as they want without any limitations. Most of the time we took mental notes on how we would like such invoice templates to work but we didn’t feel comfortable to start with the realization. We knew something was missing so we let the idea distill itself and after the summer last year we finally started coding and iterating through different concepts.

We wanted the invoice templates to follow two major things:

1. To be easily imported and used in Invoicebus without modifications
2. To be used standalone without any dependency from Invoicebus

Few months ago we silently launched this in beta as we were still fine tuning the details. Now we believe it’s time to announce its official launch.

Custom Templates

Without hesitation we knew the templates should be made with HTML and CSS. That way they can be used in Invoicebus without converting from one format to another. We finally put to realization our collected notes and made our invoice templates framework. Some rules were also set to make sure the templates are compatible with the new version of Invoicebus.

However, one of the most interesting parts was making the templates work standalone. It’s easy to imagine Word or Excel invoice templates working standalone, well not really standalone as MS Office is still required, but who doesn’t have one right? But to make working HTML/CSS template we had to somehow make it dynamic and usable on the fly. That’s when we decided to make the HTML Invoice Generator. This is a simple script that can be included at the bottom of an HTML invoice template, and it’ll transform it to fully functional invoice editor with the following features:

• Ready to fill out and print on the fly.
• Can be easily customized with your own logo and colors.
• Support any language and currency.
• Support multiple taxes.
• Auto calculate subtotals, totals, taxes, and discounts.
• Configurable columns, date format, and symbol position (left/right).
• Manipulate rows with simple drag and drop.
• Run directly in a browser on your local computer (PC, Mac, Linux).
• No setup or additional software needed.
• Hassle-free integration with Invoicebus.

We’ve never really liked Word/Excel invoice templates as they’re pretty hard to work with. The layout can get messed-up easily and the calculations are hard to tweak with all that item rows and totals. We’re pleased we can offer something new, something fresh in the invoice templates world. Actually we got so excited that we made a decision to open the technology for the invoice generator. If you’re tech savvy and know your way with web technologies you can grab the code yourself at GitHub and tweak it to your needs. We even prepared a guide you can follow if you want to create your own invoice template. If you decide to use the script as is, no more than basic HTML & CSS knowledge is required to create your own invoice template.

The best thing about the templates is their seamless integration with Invoicebus. You can pack your custom template in a zip file and upload it to Invoicebus, or even simpler – we embedded “Save” button that will do all the heavy-lifting for you (described at the end of the post). It’s great to know that not only your online invoices, but also the PDFs you generate will have the new invoice design you applied.

Interactive example

Here’s a live example of an invoice template you can play with:

Note: this is a scaled-down version for demonstration purposed only and it lacks some of the actual features. The real templates are with bigger size and are more usable.

Templates Store

We made the template framework and the invoice generator, but we didn’t want to leave our users hanging in that state. No matter how simple and straightforward everything might seem, designing a template can be a burden and time consuming task for many people. That’s why beside the 6 basic templates already included in the bus we decided to include another 4 premium templates, all ready to use*.

The icing of the cake is our newly launched Template Store, where you can browse over a dozen creative designs and choose the one closer to your brand and colors. There you can find different styles of templates – generic, corporate, retro, handwritten, etc., that will amplify your professionalism when presented to your clients.

Cool thing is that you can use this invoice templates independent of Invoicebus. They are standalone and autonomous so you don’t need an Invoicebus account to create invoices with them. However, because they’re HTML/CSS based there’s no easy way to save the invoice locally on your computer. That’s why we added “Save” button that saves the invoice data and the template to Invoicebus with a single click. Of course this is completely optional and you can always print or save the invoices to PDF (with Google Chrome) for future reference.

So go ahead and check out the amazing templates we have in the store.

* Custom and premium invoice templates in Invoicebus are available for Single-decker and Double-decker subscription plans.

Author information

Dimitar Stojanov

Co-founder at Invoicebus

Dimitar is co-founder of Invoicebus, an online invoicing tool for easy invoice management. He's passionate about creating beautiful and simple web applications and occasionally writes on this blog about web design, online business, and fighting the status-quo. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

| Twitter | Facebook | Google+ |

The post Custom invoice templates have arrived appeared first on Garage.

Most of the invoice functions are translated for the quotes also. We will cover only the most common for both document types. The windows shown in the context below pop up when you choose some of the related actions.

Send by Email

– Option that helps you to send an HTML version of your invoice/quote to the client’s email address.

– Attach PDF option is included in case you wish to include PDF version.
– You can enter custom text message to your recipient.

The default message is edited from inside the same window. When you click Edit Default Message link, the text-box becomes modal, which means everything around it dims (becomes foggy), and the focus is brought only to the vital part; thereafter you can save your default message. Why to open the hood (read: settings) , when you can manage everything from inside the cabin (read: right here, where your focus and attention are). Intuitive, natural and fast just as blink of an eye.

Invoice/Quote Viewed notification

Notification will be sent to you when your client views the emailed invoice/quote for the first time.

Accept/Decline Quote directly from email

– After your client receives the quote, it will be able to accept or decline it directly from the email. Upon his decision you will get immediate email notification.

This appears at the bottom of your emailed quote

Download to PDF

Generate PDF file from your invoice/quote and download it to your computer. PDF version looks exactly the same as it’s shown in the invoice/quote view mode.

Enter Payment (available only for unpaid invoices)

– This option allows you to maintain your payment records.
– If you enter smaller amount than the invoice total, it will be considered as a partial payment.

Payment Reminder (available only for unpaid invoices)

– Notify your client when the invoice is overdue. Reminder contains your custom  message and a few automatically generated details regarding the invoice.

Thank You Note (available only for fully paid invoices)

Good practice to show gratitude for your completed business deal is to send a tank you note which contains your custom message and a short details regarding the invoice.

All actions taken for one particular invoice/quote are recorded in the Activity History section within that invoice/quote. We will talk more on this in the upcoming feature preview posts.

Author information

Invoicebus Team

We're a team comprised of a few die-hard code freaks, lovers of beautiful design, stewards of simplicity, and passionately dedicated to the user experience. Invoicebus is a great vehicle to express what we do best. Click here to learn more on our business philosophy and how we actually do it.

| Twitter | Facebook |

The post Feature Preview 2: Invoice Functions appeared first on Garage.

Why to manage numerous of data in different places and deal with complex customer relationship management modules when you can do all from one place, integrated and straightforward like an A.

Few of the core functionalities derived from this panel are:

• Filtering
• Sorting
• Calculating

Need convincing? Let’s start.

Clean, appealing list of invoices

Every invoice in the list is presented with:

• A few of its details (issue date, number, client);
• Optional description;
• Status (paid, unpaid, and overdue);
• Total bar

Beside the total amount of an invoice, the total bar visually shows percentage of how much money has been paid to you for that particular invoice. It’s awesome when you run on visual for your partial payments, right?

Discrete Tooltips

Tooltip is a little balloon-like box that appears when you move the mouse over the total bars and shows additional information.

Mighty Real-time Filters

Dancing summary is created when filters are applied. What does that mean?

As you apply/type filters, summary dynamically re-calculates (or dance) in real-time, depending on the matching results. You can combine multiple filters for more specific calculations.

The list will display subset of invoices that match your filter criteria; therefore its totals summary will be calculated and shown beneath. Awesome!

Sortable Columns

The Filters are mighty by themselves, but when you combine them with Sort, they become majestic.

The picture shows descending sort for the total column.

Just on a tap of your fingers, with a few clicks and maybe a little bit of your creativity; possibilities of this invoice list probably extend beyond your imagination.

Interactive Menu

Clickability (availability) of the menu operations changes on-fly according to the selected invoice. Those operations which are not available (for the selected invoice) have smoke gray appearance. The example menu from the left corresponds to a paid invoice. Booya! You can’t make a mistake, even intentionally.

Keyboard keys:

We mapped some native keyboard keys behavior, so you can feel just like you work with a conventional desktop application, not web software. Who said that web-apps suffer from this one?

Invoicebus works with no interruptions because everything happens in real time, smoothly like waltz, without a single reload. Sounds crazy? Maybe it is, a little bit, but we dare to raise today’s web-programming criteria well beyond traditional web paradigm.

Stay tuned on this blog, we’ve just started spreading the Invoicebus magic

Author information

Invoicebus Team

We're a team comprised of a few die-hard code freaks, lovers of beautiful design, stewards of simplicity, and passionately dedicated to the user experience. Invoicebus is a great vehicle to express what we do best. Click here to learn more on our business philosophy and how we actually do it.

| Twitter | Facebook |

The post Feature Preview 1: Outgoing Invoices appeared first on Garage.