Faster and more intuitive invoicing in CurdBee
Since our launch two years ago, our primary concern has been creating a simple and easy to use invoicing process. As CurdBee matured, we started to see new issues that needed fixing (such as the process of selecting a client or item from a long list) and started to see ways in which we could improve the app. Also, we received lot of feedback from our passionate user base, and got many suggestions on how CurdBee could work better for them.
Thus, we went back to the drawing board to work on some tweaks, and today, just a few weeks later, we’re ready to go live with them.
Here are some of the noteworthy changes we made.
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The Client to the top!
If you look closely, the wording, currency, payment terms and pretty much everything else on your invoice depends on the client you are sending it to. In terms of IA, we felt that selecting the client at the very beginning was the most intuitive, and with this upgrade we shift to this new model of invoicing.
Client selection moved to top -
Smart suggestions for Clients and Items
If you have to deal with a long list of clients or product items, selecting them can be a tedious process. To counter the use of lengthy lists, we decided to let CurdBee pop-up suggestions as you type.
Old: Client Selection
New: Client Selection -
Invoice Summary
Many CurdBee users said that it would be cool if they could specify a summary for an invoice or estimate. We felt this could definitely be helpful in certain cases and the functionality is now enabled as of this release. Now, every invoice and estimate has an optional summary field.
Invoice Summary -
Free-form Line Items
Until now, when you wanted to create a line item, you had to pick an item to go with that line. Some users found this a bit confusing and some had trouble when it came to maintaining long list of items. With this release, we decided to remove this necessity and make free-form line items. Now you are now longer restricted to using items that are already created and can freely utilize the area to describe the line item the way you want.
Old: Item Selection
New: Item Selection -
Save Item for Reuse
If you were worried about the introduction of above feature forcing you to enter a line item manually every time you wanted to use it, fear not! Here’s an option that will save your day. In the latest version of CurdBee, you can save frequently used line items for repeated use.
Save item for reuseFurther, with our newly introduced smart suggestions option, you can easily populate a line with a previously saved line item.
Smart Tip: Use a colon “:” to break the item name and the description when entering your item details and saving the item for reuse.
e.g. Web Design: WordPress CMS Template Design and Development -
Auto-growing fields for line items and notes
Rather than restricting text areas to a certain number of rows, we decided to let them to grow as you type. I know! Awesome, right? Now you can easily format your invoice notes and line item descriptions without worrying about space constraints.
Auto-growing text fields
Finally, and in case we weren’t clear before, all these changes are applied not only to Invoice creation screens, but to the Estimates and Recurring Billing processes as well.
Lessons for Startups
Three seemingly simple but important advices for Startups.
Ask yourself: if you started over today, would you build the same product? If not, consider significant changes to what you are building. The popular word for this today is “pivoting” and I think it is apropos. You aren’t throwing away what you’ve learned or the good things you’ve built. You are keeping your strong leg grounded and adjusting your weak leg to move in a new direction.
Why Joost Failed, How Foursquare Surpassed the Competition, and Other Lessons for Startups
CurdBee: Google Checkout notification integration updated
In the past few weeks, some of the users, who are using Google Checkout gateway, complained us automatic payment notifications from Google Checkout is not captured correctly by CurdBee. We’ve fix the issue and had to do couple of updates on this whole process. Most noticeable change is now we are using the latest version (version 2.5) of Google Checkout API.
To get the notifications to work once again with CurdBee, you will have to select the version 2.5 from your Google Checkout’s Integration settings. For step by step instructions on how to configure this, please refer to this article.
Contact our support if you experience any issues after this change or need any further help with configuration.
The first HTML5 mobile app framework
One of the major aspects of HTML5 is its potential to replace native mobile apps and bridging barriers between various mobile platforms. This could very well be developed into the ultimate portable technology for mobile devices and provide the developer with more time for better implementation rather than worrying about bridging cross platforms. Sencha Touch – the first HTML5 mobile framework is an exciting step in this direction.
Here are some of the more impressive features of the framework.
- HTML5 Geolocation
- Sench Touch icon set
- JSONP Proxy
- YQL Data Proxy
- Momentum scrolling
- Scroll touch event
- Pop-up Overlays
- Mobile form elements
- CSS3 Gradients
- CSS3 Transitions
- Multi-Card Layout
- Tab Panel Component
- Scrollable list view
- Swappable headers
New WordPress 3.0 with awesome improvements
The new release of WordPress 3.0-RC3 is bringing some cool improvements to the most popular blogging platform. This includes UI changes, addition of a new default theme – Twenty Ten, and most of all – custom post types and custom taxonomies.
Here is a complete set of major improvements.
- Choose your Username and Password
- New Default Theme!
- Custom Post Types
- Multi-site Capabilities and WPMU Codebase Merge
- Custom Taxonomies
- Easy Menu Management
- Custom Author Templates
New era of the web – HTML5
There are more than enough hype about more than enough things in the world that don’t really matter and just that…hype. HTML5 is the latest hype in websphere and already has been a cause for fights among titans. However for anyone who loves web, it can’t be helped that HTML5 is at least a novelty and for most part offers things that web designers and developers alike have been dreaming about. So here goes a set of sources that would be useful to anyone interested in the topic.
- Specification
- Showcase
- Browser support
- Already underway
- But not there yet
- In depth
- Tutorial
- Cool charts
Getting started with the CurdBee Partner Programme
The CurdBee Partner Program is out, and that means that now, apart from managing all your all invoice matters with CurdBee, you can also use it to pad your wallet. How?
Currently in private beta, the CBPP is CurdBee’s affiliate programmes with a difference. Unlike other partnership schemes, the revenue you can earn from our new venture is not limited to a one time referral fee. Instead, we pay you as long as we earn from your referrals.
Link, Refer and Earn Forever
It’s that simple! After creating a CurdBee affiliate account, visit our Materials section, copy one of the HTML excerpts given with a banner, and paste it into your blog or community page. Now, any CurdBee user registering through your banner link will be registered as a referral from you and you will earn from him as long as he or she remains with us. For example, if the user subscribes to the CurdBee Pro monthly upgrade, you will earn 20% of what we make from that subscriber every month!
CurdBee Partner Banners
Don’t have a blog? Not a problem. You can still be a CurdBee affiliate! If you use Twitter, the Retweet link at the top of Materials section is for you. Clicking on the Retweet button will prompt you to enter your twitter logins and the CurdBee affiliate link will be copied to your Twitter account. Of course, this affiliate link can also be used anywhere from email and forum signatures to chat status messages.
CurdBee Partner Retweet
Add Your Own touch
One of CBPP’s newest features is the Custom Banner section which you can find under the Materials page. Here, we provide editable PNGs of CurdBee materials which you can use to create your own banners and start your own CurdBee referral campaign.
Customisable Banners
After designing your own banner, follow
Hello, Partner!
So, you’ve been using CurdBee for some time now, and you’re happy with it. We’re glad! In fact, we’re so glad that we’re going to help you get cool stuff by getting your friends involved as well. With our new Partner Program, you earn when we earn!
So, how does it work?
Basically, you refer a friend to CurdBee. If she or he becomes a CurdBee PRO user, you get 20% of the revenue we earn from that person, forever. Yes, you heard us right. For as long as your friend stays with CurdBee, you’ll get 1/5th of what they pay us.
Are you serious?
Yes, totally, totally serious. We even put together a whole new application for it! In fact, even though it was originally written to scratch an itch, we think we just might release it in the near future. Although we did do some research when we were brainstorming our partner program, many of the existing solutions were limited in terms of functionality and didn’t have some of the specific features we required such as the ability to track referrals for free signups and have their details update automatically when they upgraded to Pro or added modules to their accounts.
In particular, many applications didn’t have the option of tracking and rewarding a referring partner throughout the lifespan of the customers they brought us. This was a deal breaker for us, and we thought it would be best to put together our own software.
Keep track of all your referrals.
And how much you’re making.
So, how would I get people to sign up?
That’s totally up to you. From email to twitter, banner ads to instant messages, you’re free to use any means you like to get people to sign up for CurdBee. In fact, our referral application has promotional tools built right into it.
Choose how you’d like to spread the word.
Wow! When is this going live?
Now! Yeah, from this moment – we’re currently in the process of sending out beta invites, so if you haven’t been checking your inbox, you should definitely start hitting that refresh button. If you missed the CurdBee newsletter and would still like to try this out, you can opt in for the beta anyway. How cool is that?
Developers and those interested in the functionality of our affiliate application itself will also be pleased to note that we hope to eventually make it available as a service to more small teams with similar needs to ours. But, all in good time. For now we’re just focusing on making it work for the Bee.
That about wraps it up for this update. To all our loyal users – thanks! We’re truly grateful for your continued support of CurdBee, and hope that you’ll use the Partner Program to reap some rewards for your advocacy.
CurdBee gets Imports and Other Improvements
We are glad to inform you that we’ve made some cool new updates to CurdBee. Out of them, the major feature is no doubt the ability to import clients and items to CurdBee. We know a lot of you have been awaiting for this feature and hope this will also make life easier for many users who wants to switch to CurdBee from their legacy billing systems.
Importing Clients and Items
You can now import clients and items in CSV or XML format. All you need to do is save your existing data in one of these formats and upload to CurdBee. Also, to help you to prepare the data files we have released sample files in both formats.
The XML format will be particularly useful if you are trying to import data from an existing web app such as Basecamp, Freshbooks or Blinksale which allows XML responses via API. If you’d like to learn more, please refer our support articles on how to import clients and items.
Shorter/Prettier URLs for Invoices and Estimates
Some of you felt that the Invoice or Estimate URL generated by CurdBee looked long and messy. We heard you and decided to make the URLs shorter and more consistent. Of course, this doesn’t mean they’re guessable! The same level of security is still involved when generating a unique hash code for the invoice. If you still have old invoices lying around though, don’t worry, because old URLs will continue to work fine as well.
The new URL format is as follows:
http://example.curdbee.com/inv/4Z5IegcG
http://example.curdbee.com/est/QfRlUMHn
Standardised fields for Clients Addresses
This was actually a design mistake we made during the early stages of the application. Now, we’re fixing it for good. Formerly, we provided a single big text field for entering the address, which allowed you to use any format you liked. However, we later felt it would be good practice to standardise these address fields in the event that we ever wanted to do cool stuff like integrate data with external applications. As you can see, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to extensibility. With the address fields now standardised, we can work on giving you the option of doing more great things with your data!
Well, that’s it for now. Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy using these new features. As always, our support section is open 24/7, and we’d love to hear from you if you have comments, complaints or suggestions. Thank you once again for using CurdBee, and see you soon with more good news!
Localize CurdBee Invoices for your audience
Are you a CurdBee user with Non-English speaking customers? Does it prevent you from using CurdBee to invoice your clients? With our new localization option, we now let you to translate the key words of your invoices and estimates into your own language, so your clients will be more comfortable reading them. See here for details.
