Invotrak: The Online Invoicing Blog

This Sunday from 1-3pm EST we’ll be performing some regularly scheduled maintenance and there may be some brief interruptions in service.  Should the site be unavailable, you’ll see our regular maintenance page and will be unable to access your account until service is restored.

We’re making some scheduled upgrades to some of the servers powering Invotrak, which is necessary to maintain performance as the site continues to grow.  We’ll keep it as quick as possible.

Be sure to let us know if you have any questions, and thanks for using Invotrak!

Great news: the new version of Invotrak for the iPhone, version 2.0, is now available in the App Store!  As mentioned earlier, this new version has quite a few exciting new improvements.  Check out the quick 1-minute overview video for the rundown:

This screencast shows off the cool new features of Invotrak 2.0 for the iPhone! See how to create invoices, use templates, create and send PDF versions of your invoices, track timesheets, and more. Check out how to use it, then get Invotrak for free in the App Store.

Essentially, the application is a completely new version of Invotrak on the iPhone, including nearly all the same functionality of the application on the web into one easy-to-use iPhone app.  You can create and edit invoices, create and email PDF copies to your clients, track timesheets, and manage client information.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, check out the FREE Invotrak app.

Today a new update just went out on Invotrak.com to improve the user interface a bit.  Here’s a couple of highlights:

• The invoices page now has a “Record an Invoice” button in the top-right
• On the invoice page, you’ll notice that there is now an “Add a Line Item” link below the Line Items table (rather than having the form on the right of the page)
• There is also an “Add a Payment” link on the invoice page which pops up a small dialog, with an improved form for adding individual payments
• Finally, on the timesheets page, we switched the “Form Entry” and “Punch” tabs, based on user feedback (more people seemed to use the Form Entry version rather than Punch).

Hopefully you find the improvements helpful.  We’re constantly trying to refine the application, and we’re always looking for your feedback to help us make Invotrak even better.

Great news: Invotrak 2.0 for the iPhone has just been submitted to Apple for review!  Here’s a copy of the release notes:

Invotrak 2.0 is a major update allowing you to manage your invoices, timesheets and clients better than ever:

• Revamped user interface
• Improved support for line items in invoices
• Generate PDF invoices and view them in Invotrak
• Email invoices to clients
• Call or email your clients from Invotrak
• Invoices can be created using your timesheet entries
• Numerous stability improvements

Using Invotrak, you can easily create, view, send, and manage your invoices while on your iPhone.  It also features powerful timesheet tracking tools to record and invoice for your billable time.

We’ll have more updates about this major enhancement to the mobile version of Invotrak available in the near future, and we’ll let you know when the new version is ready for download.

Today we released a handful of updates to Invotrak (a little holiday present), including:

• Reversed the order of the paid invoices.  In the past, the paid invoices were ordered oldest first.  For users with hundreds of invoices, that meant having to go to the last page to see the most recent.  Now, the most recently paid invoices are shown first.
• New registration page.  We redesigned the register page to better show off some of the features of Invotrak.
• New invoice template: Stylish Grays.  We replaced the template “Elegant Blues” with a new one we hope you like (the old one wasn’t very popular among users).

And two bug fixes:

• Invoice statistics had a couple situations where the statistics for your invoices could get out of whack
• Partial payments miscategorized (if you record a partial payment for an invoice, the invoice could appear as though it were paid)

Hope you like the updates.  Be sure to let us know if you have any problems.

With 2009 coming to a close, now is a great time to review your tax situation.  There may still be some deductions or other elections to take in these closing days that can help you out in April.

Check out Inc Magazine’s article on “How to Reduce Your Small Business Tax Bill“:

Taxes may be the least favorite topic for small business owners, but it’s one of the most important. The steps you take before the end of the tax year can help your business save money almost immediately.

When April comes around, you’ll be glad you put some thought in now.

Every business owner is keenly aware of finding customers.  But how to find them gets increasingly complicated.  If you’ve been focused on the more “traditional” ways, such as cold-calling or advertising, you may benefit from a different approach: inbound marketing.

It used to be that you could efficiently grow your businesses by interrupting potential customers with outbound marketing methods like cold calls, email spam, and advertising. Today people and businesses are tired of being the targets of so much outbound marketing and they’re getting better and better in blocking it out.

At the same time, people and businesses have fundamentally changed the way they shop and learn, turning more and more to Google, social media sites and blogs to find what they want. Inbound marketing helps companies take advantage of these shifts by helping them get found by customers in the natural way in which they shop and learn.

Check out the five tips for creating an effective inbound marketing campaign and start applying it to your business.

We’ve just pushed out a maintenance update today that covers a few things.  Here’s a brief synopsis:

• Improved performance on the invoices page for users with lots of invoices.  We’ve made some improvements in how we handle caching of commonly-used items and managed to improve the speed quite a bit for some users.
• Several bug fixes, most notably one on the Invoice Reports page.  If you tried to choose the Other option to select a date range, you may have seen an error in Firefox.
• More API v2 updates.  As we’re chugging along on an updated version of the Invotrak API (dubbed version 2), this release has a number of supporting items for it.  Be sure to check out our GitHub page for updates.

As always, we rely on your feedback to continue making Invotrak great, so keep your comments coming!

We’ve been hard at work on a major upgrade to the Invotrak iPhone app (currently in the App Store), and are entering the home stretch.  We’ve been putting the app through its paces to iron out any problems, and we’ll have more updates here in the near future.

We just updated Invotrak with a handful of minor changes, mostly from requests on our UserVoice page.  Here’s a quick rundown:

• A new Paid column on the Invoices page, to replace the Date Due column.  This makes it easier to see when an invoice was paid in full rather than just when it was originally marked as due.  This change only applies to the invoices that are actually paid.
• More currencies (including the HRK), as requested.

New API in the Works
This update also includes a new item on the Settings page: My API Key.  If you’re familiar with other online services with APIs, then you’re likely already familiar with this concept.  An API key allows you to access certain parts of your account outside the web interface without needing to publish your username or password.

We’ve been working on a revamp of the Invotrak API lately, and this is the first part of that project.  Although it’s not quite ready for use, it will be very soon.  In particular, we’ve started a project on GitHub for the library implementation, and we’ll have plenty more to say about it here as we progress.

As always, be sure to let us know what you think of Invotrak, and to use our UserVoice page to track changes you’d like to see in the app.