You can now access NeoInvoice with a secure connection. All you need to do is prefix the address bar with https://, and you’ll be in secure mode. Just as a warning though, your browser will complain that it doesn’t recognize the certificate as being signed from a root authority. What that means is we generated our own certificate, which is just as secure of a connection as what a root-signed certificate does. The only difference is the one we use didn’t cost us anything (hey now, we’re still in beta!)

For now, you will need to manually visit the secure version of the site. We didn’t want to automatically redirect people until we buy a regular certificate as the browser popup will likely scare some people off.

We’ve decided to make NeoInvoice entirely free during the Public Beta! The free account features have also been upgraded a bit, now allowing for 10 employees (instead of just 1), and allows for 100 invoices to be emailed per month. This only applies to accounts created during the Public Beta. Accounts and data will be kept safe as we transition from Beta to Live status, not to mention the accounts will stay forever free (companies will still be able to upgrade to advanced (paid) accounts afterwards if they would like, losing the permanent free feature). We will still be offering a free account once the site is Live, but it will be back to the regular features (1 user account and 50 emails / month).

Signup for an account and take advantage of these new features before this awesome deal goes away! (No squatting please!)

That’s right, our most requested feature has finally been added to NeoInvoice! Account administrators can now login, go to their company preferences panel, and select an image to upload to NeoInvoice. These images will then appear in the upper left corner of the invoice PDF, replacing the text version of the company name. This will allow for a better branding experience and give your company that professional edge to your clients!

Current limitations are that the image needs to be a jpg and that the file size should be less than half a megabyte (we will add png and gif support soon and possibly vector formats if there is enough demand). If your logo doesn’t meet this criteria you may want to consider shrinking it down a little (keep in mind that if your invoice PDF’s get too big, they will email slower and may annoy your clients.) Your image will be automagically stretched to fit into the PDF document, and will keep it’s high-resolution appearance.

Please enjoy the new feature and leave us any comments.

We’ve just made some visual updates to the side panels in NeoInvoice!

The side panels are used for displaying your data in an easy-to-navigate hierarchical format. You can view your clients, projects, invoices (overdue and upcoming), users (sorted into groups, inactive users are dimmed), and tickets (sorted by ownership). Previously all of these items had the same icon; a blank sheet of paper. Sure, this was a generic way to represent a node of data, but these items already had icons used in different parts of the application. Now, the data items share their expected image formats.

Another update is that we’ve colorized the Tickets, so that far-future deadline tickets are monochrome, tickets due in the next week are orange, and tickets that are due today or overdue are red. We’re considering making the color schemes and date ranges configurable by the company.

Also, we are working on the ability for companies to upload their company logo’s. These logo’s would be visible on invoice PDF’s and optionally emails (although this requires the client to enable image downloads for security purposes). Branded invoices add that additional professional touch (currently company names are displayed as text).

We’ve made an overhaul to the hosting environment. The web server software has been upgraded to a faster and less resource-hungry alternative. We’ve fine-tuned expiration and compression on many of the files delivered to your browser. Since NeoInvoice has a deeper and richer interface than many of our competitors, it’s even more vital that we get the system moving as quickly as possible, in order to provide a rich, desktop-like application experience.

If you have any issues with the new system, please use the contact form and give us a shout!

We’ve done a ton of work to NeoInvoice this iteration. Most of the work involves the removal of redundant code, which was a real pain in the side to NeoInvoice development. But, we’ve come up with an efficient solution which will make future updates even quicker.

We also took care of a few minor bugs. E.G., ticket categories and stages were only partially optional since the last update, but now they are fully optional (as intended). We also found that IE was caching some pages which shouldn’t be cached (meaning you would see old information even though you had made updates to the data). We went ahead and fixed that bug too.

Finally, more of the panel content has been updated, so that small inconsistencies between panel appearances have been removed. The entire interface should feel even more like one solid application.

Even though we’ve had a surplus of accounts created over the past few days, the NeoInvoice server is still purring like a kitten. We would like to thank our new member for giving NeoInvoice a try!

We’ve simplified the ticket interface a bit for the more casual ticket using company.

Previously, the usage of Ticket Categories and Ticket Stages were required when creating Tickets. These let you track the status of tickets and design different workflows for the different kinds of work your company performs. But, sometimes you don’t want to set all this information. The casual Ticket creator can now leave the fields blank, and when they want to mark a ticket as being complete, simply delete it.

However, the Stage/Category way is encouraged, as you can set tickets as being completed and leave them in the archives and always go back to see details.

Issue Tickets and User Group support has now gone live! The combination of Time Tracking and Issue Tracking has come together to form a powerful feature set for NeoInvoice, setting us further apart from much of our competition. There are a lot of Time Tracking/Invoicing applications out there, and there are almost as many Issue Tracking apps out there, but there are relatively few apps which bring the two together. The two features are so intertwined (I worked X amount of hours, on this project, but what tickets were they related to) that it made perfect sense to make the combination.

NeoInvoice is slowly heading towards becoming a total suite of important business features (while still keeping simplicity, of course!)

If you do not want to use the Tickets or User Groups features of NeoInvoice, simply ignore them! The application will continue to work as your preferred Time Tracking and Invoicing solution.

Getting Started guide for Tickets:

Once you login, click the Administration dropdown menu from the top of the application. You will now see three new choices, Ticket Categories, Ticket Stages, and User Groups. You will want to create a items in each.

First, go to User Groups. Think about how your company functions; Perhaps you have Graphic Designers who work on interfaces and Programmers who work on the back-ends. Create a different group for the different kinds of users you have. When assigning tickets, you can assign it to a specific person or an entire group, which is where this comes in handy (User Groups will be extended in the future to include permissions and interface changes).

Now, you can edit your users and assign them to a group. You will now see a list of User Groups when editing (or creating) a user.

Secondly, you will want to create some Ticket Categories. These represent the different typical activities your company performs. An example could be “WordPress Installation” or “Business Card Design”. Ticket Categories are generic types of tasks to be performed, each with further stages inside of them. You may also want to make some very generic categories, such as “Generic Bugfix” and “Generic Enhancement”, which would cover the smaller activities being performed which don’t need a category build specifically for them.

Thirdly, it’s time to make some Ticket Stages. Pretend that one of your categories is “Business Card Design”. The different stages you would want to add would be along the lines of “Not Started”, “Gather Requirements”, “Designer Meeting”, “Initial Design”, “Client Review”, “Design Changes”, “Send to Printers”, “Deliver to Client”. Now, when a client comes along and says they need some business cards designed, you would create a ticket, put it in the Business Card Design category, set the status to Not Started, and assign it to your Graphic Designer group.

Every time work is performed for a ticket, you create a new time segment as usual, but you now have an option to select which ticket the work belongs to. As you complete different stages of the ticket, you update the ticket and specify the current stage.

About half of the application interface is now available in the German language. After logging in, edit your preferences, and choose which language to use (currently English and Deutsch). We are working on having the language automatically set the first time a visitor comes to the website to create an account, however with this still being an actively updated Beta version of the application, it wouldn’t make much sense to continuously have the wording translated every week (not to mention it would get expensive!).

Once the application goes live, there will be full German support, with the ability to select currency and number deliminators for the rest of our friends over in Europe! And, of course, as demand grows we will add additional languages. Language will be configurable on a per-teammate basis, however currency will be set on a per-business basis.

We’ve made a couple of front-end updates to NeoInvoice to make the interface more responsive and easier to use.

The first update is the addition of a much needed calendar widget! When specifying dates prior to this widget, users would have to type in the date manually. With the inclusion of the widget, users are now able to select the date from a calendar popup, scroll through different months and years, clicking the date that they would like to use (with the option to manually enter the date still available).

We’ve also updated the speed at which the different information panels are updated. Previously they would take an entire second before being updated with new information, now it is almost instantaneous. This should make for a much more fluid user experience for the power users who like to add and edit new entries in rapid succession. Hooray for productivity!

Finally, we’ve also made core updates to our JavaScript framework. This should increase application efficiency all around and make the application compatible with more browsers. If you are experiencing any weird issues after the update, make sure you refresh the application (Ctrl+F5) first to make sure you have the latest version of the different application components. If the problems still persist, contact us with your issue.