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.

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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 reuse

   Further, 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

6. 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.

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.

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

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.

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!

This means that you can now send invoices to your clients from your own URL, like billing.mycompany.com. This would no doubt make your invoices look even more professional. Of course, if you are happy using the default subdomain with curdbee.com for your invoices, you can continue to use it as you have been doing so far.

Getting Started

The process of configuring your own domain (or subdomain) with CurdBee is simple. First, you will need to create a new CNAME record entry for your domain, which should be a subdomain like section.example.com .

To add a new CNAME Record for your domain, use the DNS panel of your domain registrar. There, enter the subdomain you wish to use as the Name. For example, if you want to use www.example.com then enter ‘www’ as the name. Then enter your current CurdBee subdomain (i.e. example.curdbee.com) as the corresponding value to your CNAME (some DNS interfaces may label it as Host Name or Data).

Next, you will need to update your CurdBee settings. Login to your CurdBee account, and go to Settings > Company Profile. There, scroll down to the section called Custom Domain and specify the full domain name you want to assign to your CurdBee account (for example section.example.com). Click Save Changes and you’re ready to go!

You can now create and send a test invoice to verify whether the URL change has been successfully applied.

Please Note

It may take up to 48 hours for your DNS changes to propagate throughout the Internet. During this period your custom URL may not be accessible from all geographical regions. Please verify that your new URL is reachable before sending out invoices.

Also please note that custom domains will be used only on your external invoices and estimates (which are sent to the clients). To access the CurdBee app, you will still need to use your CurdBee subdomain.

If you run into any issues when configuring this feature, feel free to contact us.

As a SME ourselves, we’re well aware that price is a big issue when putting together our workspaces. However, we also strongly believe that for small companies to work well they need to have the best tools for the job. In fact, with that in mind, we’ve been working on something that we’re now finally ready to reveal!

With the year drawing to a close and CurdBee doing great, we’re excited to be able to give our loyal userbase a little something for the holidays. That’s right, after a good run in 2009 thanks to your constant feedback and encouragement, CurdBee is here and handing out the good stuff in the form of Bundles, a unique new promotion from your favourite online invoicing service.

Cool, right? While you’re at it though, be sure to look inside. This isn’t just $25/mo value for $10. This is the chance to get online invoicing forever for just a fraction of what you’d usually pay. While a PRO account usually costs $5/mo, now you get a chance to get everything we have to offer for just double that, a figure that will remain unchanged through future price revisions. As your invoicing needs grow, and we develop more modules, you can of course continue to add to your CurdBee package. The features you purchase with this Bundle however, will always be priced at $10/mo, no matter how long you stay with us.

If you’re think about expansion and growth, and want to be sure that your invoicing package grows with you, now’s the time to plan ahead and get the features you know you will need in the months to come. So think about it, but don’t think too much – there are only 200 hundred of these offers available and if our initial research is anything to go by, they’ll be going like hotcakes.

It’s the end of the year, and as you plan for the next, remember that despite the economy, we’re all going to grow together. So plot, plan, and consider a Bundle. It may be just what your small business needs right now!

UPDATE: This offer is no longer available. If you like to get notified on similar offers in future, please subscribe to CurdBee Newsletter

We wrote our billing system from scratch, since we wanted more flexibility with yearly billing option, PayPal payments and especially to allow easy billing capabilities for more great ideas we have in our white boards for CurdBee users in the time to come. However the implementations are never easy as on paper and we had to take little more time to tweak some of the processes and do the account migration from our old system.

So now you can start upgrading your accounts to Pro, add modules and view billing history.

We are working hard on restoring these features and will keep you updated on the progress here. Hopefully we should be able to restore these features within next couple of days (2nd week of November 2009).