In the present times, change is inevitable. It is imperative for the organization to change, modify and expand, in order to match pace with the time. We at Invoicera fervently presents to you a set of new enhancements, which hopefully you all must have noticed by now. The enhancements have been carried out to further refine the application and perform the potential fixes in the application, wherever required.

1. Improved Stats Dashboard

- Redesigned Interface: We have enhanced the look and feel of the stats graph to make it visually pleasing and more easier to understand.

- More Data at a Glance: We have enhanced the displaying charts showing the position about your outstanding Invoices, Payments Received, Estimates, Projects etc. Along with, we have added three new sections on dashboard with which you can perceive a summary of your paid invoices, outstanding invoices, your and yours client unbilled expenses and the status of your timesheet with their respective amounts and even you can generate reports from them.

2. Inventory Management

We have now added a new feature of product inventory. You can now add current stock available for any product and you can even check the backorder option. If you have selected the backorder option and then you are generating an invoice for that particular product, then the app checks if there is enough inventory of the product(s) available, triggers an error on that invoice if the stock is low.

3. Better SignUp Page

We have redesigned the look and feel of the signup page with bigger font size and fields are divided into columns to make it easier to read and to fill the required fields easily.Although, it is not a huge difference, but enough to make the signup page more consistent and highlight the more important fields.

Note: We request our valuable clients to kindly check their exported PDFs as we have made some changes in the layout of the PDF,now in exported pdf of any invoice/estimate, font size of the details will be same as on the preview of invoices/estimates.Previously, if an invoice/estimate consists of large information,then the font size of that exported pdf were smaller than on the preview,but now the font size will be same as on the preview.

So what are we waiting for? Quench your curiosity, run a thorough look across the application, get acquainted with the intricate enhancements. And hey! Do not forget to share your feedback with us.

Are you more active on Google+ than any other social network? Now you’re able to also follow Invoicera on Google+ and get all our updates in a similar fashion to Twitter and Facebook. Google+ recently came out with its pages feature enabling businesses to create pages similar to those on Facebook. While we don’t get a lot of traffic from Google+ currently, we do realize it’s in our interest to offer alternatives to our readers in the way of distributing our updates. Google+ has also been generally touted as the place where many technologically oriented people hang out.

So add us on Google+ to your circles or do it through the plugin below if you’re already signed into Google+.

We are delighted to inform you that we are doing a little refurbishing in our Free Pricing Plan as a part of our continuing mission to provide low cost yet high quality service(s) to our precious customers so that our free plan subscribers could get a greater choice, augmented flexibility to better facilitate them with managing their respective businesses successfully.

We have now increased limitations on free pricing plan and that from now onwards, limit on the number of product/services, project, expense, payment gateways etc. has been greater than before.  Also, you can now use all of the payment gateways available and up to 10 product/services, 2 projects and 10 expenses…!

Adding to it, we have recently launched a new ‘Basic’ plan looking at the huge response on our old pricing plans at just USD 9.95 including all the basic Invoicing features. We have again introduced our basic plan as this is a very competitive market, and we want to make sure we have a pricing portfolio to fit a greater number of customers and will cater to those that want to boost their sending pattern without increasing their monthly budget, that’s why we have introduced our new ‘Basic’ plan.

You can check the details regarding the new Basic plan, along with accompanying features at http://www.invoicera.com/pricing.html

Everyday we are thrilled to perceive all the sharing and referring of Invoicera generated by our users and fans. We are thankful to our affiliates and partners who were influential in making Invoicera one of the most trusted names in the online invoicing and played a major role in affiliate business success. We have now decided to celebrate this success with our affiliates and we are proudly announcing the increase in commission rate of our referral program from the current 25% to 40%  for all existing and potential Invoicera users.

Invoicera will now offer an astonishing 40% recurring commission for the lifetime to any of the user who gets any of his contact to sign up for the Invoicera’s paid subscriptions. And what more, the company has also reduced the minimum payment threshold to $50 from the previous $100. Provide us with a lead, who could be anybody like your family member or business contact etc and we’ll do the entire selling ourselves. The offer provides you, the existing users an unlimited opportunity to earn as there is no limit to the number of people you can refer. Thus, increase your earnings and capitalize on the offer.

The Terms are Simple to Understand and Easy to Learn

• You must be an active Invoicera service user in good standing to be an Affiliate.
• Refer Invoicera to your friends, business contacts etc and avail 40% recurring commission for life time!
• You will be eligible to withdraw your earnings once your earnings will be more than or equal to $50.

If you are interested in becoming our affiliate, please login to Invoicera and click on ‘Refer & Earn’ on your home page. If you do not already subscribe to Invoicera, sign up now and start earning!

This is our way to thanks our valuable affiliates and fans who are playing significant role in promoting our services to others.

We are very excited about the launch of our newly redesigned website along with the introduction of our new service “Custom Development” .We have completely refurbished the website keeping in mind the changing trends and this new look will boost various solicited features like a clean and refreshing design, easy navigation etc, to provide our users an intuitive and enriching billing experience. All teams right from design to Internet marketing were enthusiastically involved in the process of revamping the website for improving the usability and introduction of our new service.

Our Custom development service will enable you to get Invoicera to work the way you want it to by using our recently launched API. We currently offer customization services under two categories- Shopping Cart Integration and Enterprise Solutions.  The Shopping cart integration enables you to effortlessly use your Invoicera with any popular or custom built shopping cart and also enables you to integrate Recurring bill or time tracking features.

Second one is Enterprise solution which will empower you to unify your Invoicera with your company specific Enterprise solution and hence provide you with smooth business process, considerable cost reductions along with swift online invoicing. You can also create instant invoices without any manual errors or delays simply by integrating your customer order and payment form with your Invoicera account.

We hope that the new design is a lot more technically robust yet very user friendly and informative and we are certain that our new service “custom development” will prove to be a lot more gainful for our users who need to customize Invoicera as per their needs.

A few months ago, we introduced our ‘Business’ plan so that we could provide better care and supplementary features to thousands of Invoicera’s customers at a very reasonable price. This addition in pricing plan was the outcome of vigilant analysis of the way our customers have used Invoicera over the past years. After listening to your adoring feedback on the pricing plans, answering to hundreds of your emails and tickets and speaking to many of you on the phone, it became understandable that we have to make some more adjustments in our pricing plans and thus we have introduced our new unlimited plan ‘Infinite’.

With this plan, there is no need to figure it out how many clients, staff members you have added or how many invoices you may send or what it may cost if you go over your limit. Invoicera gives you unlimited invoicing to unlimited clients at one simple price – $69.95 per month. It doesn’t get any easier than this!

Over the past few weeks we have been making improvements and bringing you updates. We are always on the path to enhance Invoicera in such a manner so as to make it incredible for our customers while continually offering a great quality app with lots of astonishing features anticipated from an online invoicing tool. These improvements and updates are a consequence of feedback that we get in numbers and scrupulous brainstorming sessions performed in our chamber.

Invoicera is nearly 4 years old and serving thousands of clients world over for their invoicing tasks. It’s great to be in this position, but with a large user base comes the liability of receiving many feature requests. Requests flow in via support requests, email, blog comments, Twitter, Facebook etc. This week we continue with our series of development updates and enrichments to carry on with our responsibility of frequently improving the application’s functionality and adding all of the goodies that our customers have desired for.

In our latest updates we proffer with the following:

Account Merging

We have just managed to cross the threshold of limitations by introducing one of the biggest changes in Invoicera. As observed many users own multiple accounts with one common id and each account contains multiple invoices. Prior to the innovation of our new upgrade, If any user wants to view any invoice, then they have to login into a particular account. This doesn’t go well with some of our users who have multiple accounts with same email id. This is time consuming. But with out new update, it is now possible for users to merge their accounts if they are having more than one account with a same email id in order to view their invoices of different accounts at one common place. This will not only be time saving but help in streamlining their workflow as well.

Invitation to Join Invoicera

We believe in benefiting the client in the best way possible and keeping this in mind we came up with yet another innovative idea of invitations. With this new feature it is possible to invite your clients to join Invoicera for free and once they sign up, users will become their clients and the Invoices/estimates sent by them would be displayed in your ‘RECEIVED Invoices/estimates’ section. This will enable your clients to create professional invoices rather than wasting time in creating invoices manually on MS word or calculating your invoice totals in Excel.

Magento Extension’s New Feature

Earlier magento store owners were not allowed to import those orders into their invoicera’s account which were placed before installing magento extension to their magento store. But with this feature update, it is possible for magento store owners to import those orders also which were placed earlier before installing magento extension to their store.

Task Assign to Staff

Project contains many tasks and each task needs to be assigned to specific projects. Previously users were allowed to assign their tasks to projects only. Users who are managing team members were earlier not having the freedom to assign any particular tasks to their staff members. But with this new feature introduced by Invoicera they get an option to assign any particular task of any project to any of its staff members as per requirement.

Expense Assign to Project

Earlier, users were only allowed to assign their expenses of the project to their clients only, but now with this latest update, users are allowed to assign expenses to their projects as well along with clients.

Preview Button on Template Customization

Earlier, there was no option to preview the customized Invoice/Estimate template but in this update, a preview button has been added on template customization page. By clicking the ‘Preview button’ users can preview their customized templates while customizing or after the completion template customization.

All these features are designed to help our clients with ease of managing their invoices. But wait, we are not done yet, there are lots more, we don’t want to give the game away just yet! So stay tuned as we keep trying to bring you the best invoicing experience. In coming times you will be able to see a lot many updates, changes and enhancements and use them to your advantage as well. It is thorough your valuable inputs, suggestions and feedback that we make changes accordingly. Just drop your mail/feature request at support@invoicera.com and leave the rest to us.

If you have not been paying attention to our Add-on list, you might have missed out several great approaches to do more for your business. Add-ons are all about making your business healthier by improving the way you work with Invoicera. We consistently work upon the new ways to make your invoicing experience much better and in the same order; we have integrated our services with Magento so that the store orders can be imported in your Invoicera account and professional invoices can be sent to your customers automatically for those orders in real time.

This integration will save most of the time of Magento store owners who, so far used to send invoices to their customers for each order manually. This integration would also provide store owners an option to send invoices in their own customize invoice format (that you can easily prepare in your Invoicera account with Invoicera’s customize template feature.) rather than Magento’s standard invoice format. Invoicera’s Magento Extension is anticipated to help businesses with invoicing and is mainly helpful for companies with several sales channels, as they can now aggregate orders in Invoicera.

What Invoicera Integration with Magento can do for you?

1. Complete and precise Integration

Ensures complete and accurate export of customers, products and orders

2. Reduce Errors

It Increases effectiveness and eradicates redundancy and error-prone re-entry of data.

3. Save Time, Increase Speed

It greatly cut the time spent on data translation and data entry errors.
Export your customers, products and orders to Invoicera in well-timed manner.

If you find this integration useful for your business, please share your kind feedback in the comments section. Your feedbacks are important to us as these feedbacks motivate us to provide the best invoicing service to our clients. We would also request you to check our other integrations as well at our Add-Ons section.

In the programming world, Unit Testing is considered a religious issue that has many takers. Some vigorously for it, and some vehemently against it too.

A StackOverFlow query was answered in good spirit and (put pretty well !) and the explanation goes thus:

“Unit testing is a lot like going to the gym. You know it is good for you, all the arguments make sense, so you start working out. There’s an initial rush, which is great, but after a few days you start to wonder if it is worth the trouble.”

Just like the popular JUnit framework (for Java), the PHP world has PHPUnit (thanks to Sebastian Bergmann), a popular Unit Testing framework, that is not just feature-rich but quite extensible too.

Supporting custom configurations, PHPUnit is extensively used for the seldom used open-source applications, but more notably, its the first choice for quite a few well established frameworks (read Symfony) that command respect and a large fan-following. Further, its supported by some pretty big names for e.g. Zend (the basic engine behind PHP) or Ubuntu for that matter (which is the de-facto Linux distribution for a few years in a row).

For those living on the edge, exotic combinations of testing frameworks have allowed people to bring relatively niche concepts like Continuous Integration to PHP using free tools like Hudson (a.k.a Jenkins) and Phing. Integrating popular Revision Control systems (GitHub / FogBugz) as well as GUI testing frameworks (for e.g. Selenium), PHPUnit’s maturity speaks for itself.

The Invoicera team, already have in place such a test framework, and re-aligning more and more modules to this framework is an on-going process. As it stands, currently all API modules conform to a rigorous set of tests that are run periodically. Any change-set that is to be committed to the repository, is first tested and committed only when all tests pass.

Despite this, we do obviously get feedback that bring to the testing team’s notice, test-cases that got away. For all such issues, while the support-team responds to the support-query (after interacting with the technical-team), the testing-team in parallel, ensures that there are appropriate test-cases ready to avoid this specific issue in the future.

Finally, PHPUnit (or Unit-Testing in general) is a great way to reduce bugs. Although there obviously are classes of errors that this form of testing can’t catch, sensibly used, this is still a decent arsenal in a developers kitty to stop getting awful bug-reports from QA

Today marks the first major release of the Invoicera API. This is an important milestone for all third-party developers who intend to integrate Invoicera platform with any of their existing or new applications. The Invoicera API is simply another way to access your Invoicera data and it enables the third-party and custom tools to programatically access and interact with the Invoicera service.

When we started a few months ago, we tried moving as fast as we could, doing whatever it took to hack-up code and flash new features in this API. As we progressed, we learnt how to do a few things, but more importantly, we learnt how not to (do a few other things!). Sometimes this led us to optimize a few key API modules, whereas sometimes, we chose to start all over again.

After a private Beta launch back two months back, we’re launching the Invoicera API v1.0 today.

For those (the technically inclined), who are keen to know its haves and have-nots, lets begin with the have-nots.

Although the API obviously supports Invoicing, it currently does not support exotic features such as template re-selection for invoices (or estimates). API token reset is also a chicken-and-egg problem that we chose to hatch on a later date. Similarly, username-password based logins are important for third-party applications where API token needs to be typed-in. Since this (minor) issue is again something that has workarounds (like QR-Codes) we didn’t think it needed to be prioritized for today. (Incidentally the Invoicera mobile application would use QR-Codes to login to the API, which is the reason why we’ve quietly launched QR-Code in the ‘My Settings’ page

Further to this, we’re obviously expecting a lot of feedback from our users who’d be a big help for us to prioritize enhancements to the Invoicera API.

Coming to the haves, Invoicera API has almost all of the must-haves, which would allow you to build an extensive mobile (or tablet, or chrome, or … ) app without much looking around. With sample working code (for PHP) and template XML provided for on the website, building an app of any kind (viz. iOS / Android / Chrome / Ovi / etc..) should now be pretty-close to cake-walk.

To enlist (besides the obvious Invoicing module), we ensured that Invoicera API (v1.0) supports most major Invoicera features right-out-of-the-box !

● Invoice
● Client
● Staff
● Product
● Service
● Estimate
● Expense
● Time Log

Further, as of this v1.0 release, the API supports only XML, but we do plan to support JSON soon. REST is a possibility too, but we’re really looking for a lot of user-feedback to prioritize this ahead of feature enhancements. As you would have noticed, this is the chief reason why the API URL sports a relatively structured schema (/api/xml/1.0/) which could later be extended to something like /api/json/3.0/ as and when required.

All-in-all, we’re very happy with the way Invoicera API has come out to be, and would like you to give it a try. Obviously we’re open to feedback, but more importantly, we’re eagerly awaiting your app (amongst a plethora of Invoicing apps) to complete the Invoicera ecosystem.