Invotrak: The Online Invoicing Blog

With the increasing popularity of invotrak, we’ve had to deal with scaling invotrak up. One of the first things we had to do was rethink our database setup: luckily we were able to make some fundamental changes that sped it up quite a bit. But unfortunately, we’re now at a point where we need to start throwing some bigger hardware around. So, this weekend, we’re moving invotrak to new servers!

What this means is two things: during the move, you will not be able to access invotrak. The bottleneck is not with the move (that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes), but rather with updating the address. When you type “www.invotrak.com” into your browser, your computer looks up the actual address of the server where the site is running (think of it as a telephone book: you know the name of the person you would like to call, but you need to match that name with the actual telephone number – same principal). The problem here, though, is the telephone book can take some time to fully update.

The move will be happening this Saturday night (October 27th), at 10pm EST or thereabouts. This should give it plenty of time to update for Monday.

Update 1: The move has been made and the DNS servers should update within the next four hours or so.

Update 2: Looks like things should be back to normal now in invotrak’s new home!  Let us know if you have any problems.

Just added a whole bunch of new currencies, based on user requests. It’s very exciting to see so many users from all around the world using invotrak! Users can now track their invoices in the currency of their choice, which can be set on the invotrak Settings page (just login and click the Settings tab at the top of the screen).

The next step is to update invotrak to support multiple simultaneous currencies (i.e. allowing you to set the currency for each invoice, rather than for all invoices simultaneously). Ideally, I’d like to also allow for exchange rates, so the stats box on the right of the Invoice Listings page shows total (converted) values. But, unfortunately, these aren’t terribly easy to implement. Unless there are users out there that are burning to have these kinds of features implemented, I’ll de-prioritize it for the time being so we can get other things implemented (like searching).

As always, keep your suggestions coming!

There are a couple of new features for invotrak. First, the listings pages are displaying completed invoices as pages: if you have hundreds of completed invoices, you can easily page through them to find the one you’re looking for. In addition, you can also sort invoice listings: just click the title of the column to re-sort.

Second, there’s a new user tutorial available, designed to give new users a walk through of invotrak. We’ve designed invotrak to be as simple as possible, and hopefully this tutorial will make it easier for new users to get started.

The features come from user suggestions, so if you have an idea for invotrak, be sure to let us know!