December update - Xero and Invoicing

A quick retrospective on the work we've been doing over the month of December, and a sneak peek at what we have planned for early 2015.

Xero add-on

The add-on is complete, and Xero are just running it through their approval process in order to make Timestamp a full add-on partner. All being well, this should be live early next year!

Invoicing improvements

Based on useful customer feedback we've been making a number of changes to invoicing to make it much more flexible and usable. Changes include:

  • A searchable project / client selector (if you have more than 10 items). Anyone with a long list of projects and clients knows that searching for the right one can be tedious. Now just start typing in the search box and the list will narrow down to the best matches.
  • Ability to include or exclude time entries and expenses as required. Don't want to include expenses, or your time on an invoice? No problem, just exclude them.
  • Ability to group your time and expenses by project, task (or expense category) or user. We still offer a detailed breakdown of each time entry and expense, and you can now choose what goes in to each line item with the addition of being able to include the comments from time entries
  • The automatic inclusion of the number of miles travelled when in detailed line item mode
  • Warnings about time entries and expenses that can't currently be invoiced due to issues such as not marking an expense as re-billed, or time entries for a non-billable task this will hopefully help to avoid the confusion that some people were having

Misc

  • All dropdowns are now searchable, like the project selector in the invoices area (if you have more than 10 items)
  • Rates (used to generate invoices and your project revenue) can now be set directly for a project, as well as for each project member. As per project members, rates can change over time meaning you can manage those tricky, long projects that evolve over time and involve changing requirements and re-negotiations

Plans for early 2015

  • Continue Project Dashboard work - we're a little behind where we'd like to be as we're currently replacing our graphing library to make our life easier going forward and enable better capabilities for visualising your data
  • We want to build a unified rates interface so that all the information is a bit more glanceable
  • Improvements to time entry and approvals based on customer feedback

Season greetings

Lastly, it's that time of year again with only 2 days to go until Christmas! Thanks to our customers and everyone else who's supported Timestamp in 2014. Have a great Christmas and fantastic start to 2015!

Adam Barclay