Simply Invoices

Simply Invoices version 1.3 is now running. What’s the biggest change? Invoice templates now allow you to choose a language for the invoice. Available options are English, Spanish, German and French.

Thanks to Carmen Ruiz of motiongrafixs for help with the Spanish translation and Norman Janssen of mediacode for help with the German translation. I couldn’t round up a volunteer for the French translation, so Google gets credit for that.

Pleaselet me know about errors in the translations.

Also in this release is support for a tax rate in the invoice template. Carmen pointed out that this is inadequate for a lot of European customers needing to charge multiple tax rates. I hope to add custom tax fields in an upcoming release.

This release also fixes a bug in the image upload process. Some of you may have noticed that your images weren’t being sized correctly. That has been fixed.

Enjoy!

What’s next? A lot of people have been requesting fixed priced line items and the ability to charge per day instead of per hour. I hope to update the invoice editor to allow more flexibility. The hard part will be keeping everything simple :) I don’t yet have an estimated date for this release. Feel free to drop into the Campfire chat and ask me for status.

A common request is for the ability to send invoices to clients that don’t speak English. This feature is in Beta now.

The current list of languages I’m supporting is: English (done :D), Spanish, French and German.

I’d love to add to that list. If you speak another language and wouldn’t mind translating a very small set of words/phrases please contact me and I’ll send you the list.

Along with this update I plan to add support for tax fields to the invoices. That should be in the next beta update.

I expect these features to be deployed to the main site later this week.

As mentioned previously, the ability to send invoices via email was in the works. That feature is now available to all users. Enjoy!

I also ended up throwing in a few minor enhancements in as well.

First is that each invoice template now has a setting for “Currency”. This is the first baby step towards fully localized invoices. Don’t worry, I’m not stopping here. Support for choosing the language, tax fields and better currency support is on the way. If you’d like to help with the localization effort, please contact me.

Next minor enhancement is the ability to add a note to invoices. You can provide a default note in the invoice template. And of course the note is fully customizable in the invoice inline editor.

One last change is that the ‘Pro Blue’ invoice style has been updated. Hector Cabarcas of Bamba Design provided some great tips and screenshots for how some subtle changes could improve the layout. I’ve done my best to apply those.

Enjoy!

Although the focus of this blog is certainly Simply Invoices, occasionally I’ll mention some technical stuff. Like what you see below.

One of the things you should never notice about Simply Invoices is that the source code is hosted at RoundHaus. I only mention this because RoundHaus is now publicly available starting today and wanted to give it a good plug.

If you are a rails developer, I highly recommend you give RoundHaus a try (30 day free trial included w/ all paying plans). Along with never having to remember the syntax to ‘svnadmin’ again, you get:

• continuous integration (more on how this saved me below)
• super easy user control
• “signals” (also more on this below)
• a very purty code browser

I think one of the biggest draws of RoundHaus will be the continous integration + signals. To explain why, let me tell you how it saved me from making a dumb mistake.

I had just finished a small modification to Simply Invoices. All my tests passed. So, naturally I checked in the code and was just about to give it the green light to deploy to the production server. Seconds before I was to deploy I received a tweet in Twitterrific stating “Brian had broken Simply Invoices”. Gah! I clicked the convenient link in the tweet and found the problem in seconds. I forgot to check in a file (duh). I checked in the file and all was well. I waited for the “Brian has fixed…” tweet and deployed.

So, that’s my continuous integration + signals success story. The Twitter signal in RoundHaus, plus Twitterrific makes for a great tag team.

Feel free to follow Simply Invoices on twitter. You can also follow me if you like.

If you have any interest in emailing your invoices directly from Simply Invoices, please contactme.

I’ve just added this feature and am testing it out now. Here’s a taste:

I’m happy to announce that after two weeks, I’ve released the first significant update to Simply Invoices. I’m calling this version 1.1

As you can see in the previousposts, the big change is that your Basecamp account is no longer a per user setting, but is now a per invoice template setting. You may also choose ‘manual entry’ instead of a Basecamp account for those of you not using Basecamp, or who aren’t tracking their time in Basecamp.

I’m hoping this widens the audience a little. Minimally, it sets the stage for me to support for integration with other time tracking apps.

Enjoy!

p.s. Thanks to all those that helped test this new version.

I’m finishing up the features mentioned previously. I’m expecting to publish the new version on Tuesday or Wednesday and would love some help testing :D If interested, send me an email, visit the campfire or leave a comment.

Next up on the increasingly long feature list is some internationalization. I won’t be internationalizing all of Simply Invoices, but I’ll be making it so the invoices you create are fully localized for your client. This update is probably 4-6 weeks away. I’ll post more on that later.