FreeAgent Update - Release Prosecco

About Prosecco

Yesterday we deployed release 'Prosecco' with more than the usual amount of pride.

We're pretty pleased with our new Invoice Gallery, but we know that with your help it could be even better. So try it out, design a template for yourself (if that's your bag), and be unstinting in your feedback!

Invoice Gallery

People have been asking about this for a while, and now it's here!

You can currently choose from one of five template designs: Simple (which is the same as our existing template), Bauhaus, Lola, Tranquility and Union.

There are two ways to choose a template:

• Use the 'Change Template' drawer right on the invoice page itself, which just changes the template for that one, Draft invoice. (Marvel at the technology and amaze your friends as the invoice preview changes automatically to reflect the new design. Surely it doesn't get any better than this?)
• Use the Invoice Gallery (in the left-hand navigation bar under the Invoices tab) to change all existing Draft invoices and set the default template for future invoices you create.

As usual, the appearance and content of Sent invoices is frozen, so you can't change the template for those.

If you want to design your own template, either for your own company use or to submit as a candidate for the Gallery, visit the Invoice Developer Area and download Invoice Devkit v1.2.

Add Unbilled Items to Existing Invoices

You can now add unbilled time and expenses to existing draft invoices - handy if you forgot to add them the first time round, or if you've missed an expense or two.

It also allows you to bill time and expenses from more than one project - select a different project (from the same client, unless you want to get really confused) when you edit the invoice and choose to add unbilled time and expenses from that one too.

As is currently the case, only unbilled items dated on or before the invoice date are included (although you can of course change that when you edit the Invoice too).

Obviously the invoice, once sent, will only affect the budget of the project which was last selected. FreeAgent doesn't try to group together newly added time with existing timeslip task groups, and you may wish to edit the invoice item descriptions if you have similar task names across the projects. We may refine this to be a bit cleverer in the future.

Accounting Improvements

We're continuing to improve accuracy and performance of the industrial-strength accounting engine that underpins FreeAgent.

Trial Balance and Profit and Loss Summaries are much faster to display, and a new Transaction screen allows you to drill down to the individual transactions in any given accounting period.

Bits and Bobs

We've tweaked the following bits and bobs:

• The 'Other Information' section is no longer displayed on invoices if there is no information to show there.
• New Invoice Items default to the 'Products' type if there is no billing rate set for the current project. If there is, the correct basis ('hours' or 'days') is still used as the default.
• A new invoice item type 'Training' has been added.
• Expenses entered prior to the FreeAgent start date no longer erroneously affect the expense-owed balance. You might have entered these if you purchased a Capital Asset out-of-pocket. The actual opening balance is still set under your user details.

Cheers and happy invoicing!