It might sound strange – but we’d love you to spend less time with BillGrid. If we designed the system right – you’d be on your way to the beach (or other preferred location) while BillGrid is doing the heavy work. The goal is obvious – create invoices in seconds, setup payment integrations to easily accept payments and use due date reminders so you would not need to do any follow ups. So what happened? Well, as hard as it is to accept – but we could have used some improvements to help invoice creation, payments interface and so on. We’ve listened to the feedback and are now ready with some time-saving improvements!

Wise Client Picker

If you have more then a few clients – selecting them out of the long list is a painful endeavor. Why not add a type-ahead picker that matches to any part of the client name, say you?

Record More Details About Offline Payments

When entering client payment its handy to remember when the payment was made, how the payment was made (check, credit card..) and maybe some additional details about it. We realize that not all payments are done online – so we’ve enabled to enter all of such details within your Payment screens.

More Intuitive Online Payment Screens

Your client will thank you for the the uplifted payment interface – which is now more mobile friendly and intuitive.

Client with Tax Id

In some countries – it is required to have company Tax Id specified for each company listed. Even if you could have jammed that information before in other fields – we’ve added a designated location for it under Additional Information.

We’ve Been Busy!

Our team has been busy churning out some really cool features in addition to our homepage redesign. While our new design motto’s been “less is more” – it certainly does not reflect on the number of improvements we’ve made all over the place. Check out the basics in this email or simply log in to your account and see for yourself.

Scheduled Plan Changes

Over the last few years we’ve been growing at an extremely high rate, adding many successful freelancers and small business companies to the BillGrid’s fold. We have and always will be treating our clients like family,  while trying to deliver our product and support that we wouldn’t hesitate to use ourselves.

Our Professional and Company (Team) plans will remain unchanged.

Legacy freeware accounts will remain until May 1st, 2013. If you are using BillGrid’s legacy freeware plan – please sign up to Professional or Company plans and support our product.

Invoice/Estimate Summary

Have special client salutation requirements or just want to summarize the work before starting the invoice line items? Check out a new Summary field on the invoice and estimate form.

Improved Time Import Functionality

Newly minted time import feature allows importing time entries with detailed and customized descriptions in detailed or group arrangement.

Have You Changed Your Theme Yet?

Customize your invoices by style and color. You can select from classic and bold themes while setting background and font colors to whatever is your most favorite color. Check out the Change Theme button on the View Invoice or View Estimate page.

To make sure your browser is not holding on to the older version of the recently updated BillGrid – please clear your browser cache. Below are the instructions on how to do so for most major browsers.

Chrome

Find Settings

History: Clear All Browsing Data… : Obliterate option Since the Beginning of Time

Internet Explorer

Settings: Internet options: General tab, section Browsing History: Delete…

Firefox

Settings: Options: Advanced tab: Network tab: Cached Web Content section: Clear Now

Settings: Options: Advanced tab: Network tab: Offline Web Content and User Data section: Clear Now

If you need to post more then one person when sending a quote or an invoice – you can now add multiple client contacts. When you are adding or editing a client – click Add Additional Contact and fill out the necessary details.

Once you’ve saved a client with multiple contacts and went on to create a new invoice or estimate – you’ll be able to select notification destination among multiple contacts. Whichever contact was marked as primary – will always be selected by default.

And we did not stop there. We’ve simplified adding contacts by breaking them down into Person and Company types. Person contact type has just name and email fields. Company client type includes address and allows multiple contacts.

Happy Invoicing!

If you are like us, you must be using some kind of a calendar application. We use calendar to check on appointments, verify future engagements and track time spent by each activity. Now wouldn’t it be perfect if tracking invoice due dates, deliverables and payments was possible without going to another application… We heard your suggestions, and made them possible.

• If you are not using Google Calendar directly – most calendar applications already support Google calendar within their settings. Please refer to you application’s settings section for more help.
• You can use either a new calendar within Google Calendar or use your default  We recommend to add a new one so that its easy to configure tags for all of the events at once. Here is how you can do it from within Google Calendar:

To create a link between your Google Calendar and BillGrid you should go to Settings / Third Party Integrations and click on Add Integration next to Google Calendar. After a few screens of approval you will be able to pick which calendar you’d like to link BillGrid events with.

All invoice due dates and approvals will now post directly to the calendar you specified as an “all-day event”. All estimate delivery date and approvals will be posted to your calendar as well. When you delete an invoice or estimate – BillGrid automatically removes the event from your calendar. You can setup individual permissions on what you’d like posted on your calendar from the Settings / Third Party Integrations page:

If you are not seeing events posted properly:

• If your Google Calendar’s General Settings is not allowing to show events that you did not approve – you need to update it. BillGrid will remind you of this when you are linking your calendar account.

• If you are not seeing an event after an invoice or estimate was created (with properly linked account) – you should refresh your page with Google Calendar loaded. To doso – click on the Calendar tab or re-login to your Google account.

Have you tried BillGrid‘s intuitive client billing and time management application yet? If you have – we hope you enjoy Google Calendar event integration. If not – it takes less then a minute to begin! 

Australian Government Tax Invoice specifications require:

• visible information about supplier with ABN (Australian Business Number)
• brief description of item(s) sold with quantity and price
• taxable information of each item
• issue date
• GST tax amount
• if document was issued by recipient – GST is to be payable by supplier

Would BillGrid help with creating a proper Tax Invoice?

If your base account currency is already in Australian Dollars your clients would automatically be created in Australian Dollar currency. If not, you can always select AUD when creating a new client – or even on the invoice directly.

You should be able to add “GST” tax item in your Settings / Taxes section

To add your company tax id to the invoices – you can add add it under Settings / Company Profile. If you forget to do this step – you can always try mentioning it within the Notes section.

When creating an invoice – you’ll find proper due and issue date fields, invoice summary and line items with proper pricing and tax details. You should be able to change your invoice label to “Tax Invoice” by hovering over the INVOICE text and editing it afterwards.

If you are creating an invoice as a recipient you can setup GST tax with a negative percentage, such that it is discounted from total

Final Look

Hope you’ve found this helpful & happy invoicing!

We are thrilled to announce a new feature of BillGrid – file attachments. Everyone can attach receipts, documents or other files to your client estimates or invoices:

File attachments are easily identifiable on the view invoice and estimate page by file type and file name. Your clients will be able to open the attachments in their browser by clicking on the file name link:

File attachments should be < 5 MB and we are still working out how much total allowed space for each registered account. Stay tuned and have a great weekend!

Our solution is desinged to save our customers time when taking care of their billing needs. While we are focused on making sure our system is very intuitive, sometimes it is not as straightforward as it may seem. Our current update is packed with time saving features, check them out below.

Redesigned Client View Section

With our recent addition of Projects and Time Logs we realized that some began spending more time to get to individual client invoice or estimate. Having reviewed that – we went back to the drawing board – which resulted in the current update. New Client View page lists all client projects with quick summary of all estimates, invoices, expenses and time logs.

Terms & Conditions, Notes Defaults

Of coarse it is possible to keep adding Terms and Conditions and Notes over and over for every invoice and estimate. We added a new way to doing that, that takes a lot less time! Check out Estimate & Invoice Defaults settings, which allows to save common terms and notes and have them show up on every new invoice and estimate.

 Import Logged Time to Invoice

Logging time is done to capture the actual amount of work spent on the project. Time can be easily imported to an invoice by following a quick Import to Invoice command. Importing time to invoice is quick – you can select time range, project, staff members, billable or non-billable time and even add a new hourly rate to be invoiced with. Check out how the workflow looks like in the series of screenshots below.

Its not always about make it or break it, especially in the start up world. For every Instagram there is plenty of other similar photo sharing sites that tried, but not succeeded. With every failure comes a lesson and there is an excellent resource where you can see the non-mainstream version of what startup environment is really about.

About: At BillGrid we understand the dynamics of the startups and happy to help in any way we can. If you are in the process of creating a company or are an espiring startup short on finances – we offer free invoicing and time management solutions to help your business grow and scale without the need of an army of accountants. Check out our service @ billgrid.com.

There is plenty of work to be done in legal counseling, however creating basic contracts does not have to mean that you have to visit a lawyer for every new proposal. There is an excellent tool available at Freelancer’s Union called Contract Creator – which allows creating a basic work contract with a few easy to go through steps. Check it out by going: https://be.freelancersunion.org/contract-creator/

About: We are an online invoicing and time management company located in the hear of New York City. Our mission is to help small businesses and freelancers manage their day-to-day job easier without an army of accountants or a billing department. Check out more information at billgrid.com.