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.

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.