Acuinvoice

The AcuInvoice team has been hard at work implementing features, bug fixes, and UI updates. Expect blog communications to pick up considerably next week, as we unveil some significant new features and communicate a few exciting developments within the company.

Steady Progress

Since the initial AcuIvoice launch on October 7th, we have closed 50 tickets, including 16 this week. On behalf of the entire development team, I would like to thank the AcuInvoice subscribers for emailing us with your feedback and change requests. We can’t emphasize enough the impact that your suggestions have made on product development and sincerely hope you will continue to support this development effort by providing constructive criticisms.

A Big Thanks

We would like to extend a special thanks to an AcuInvoice subscriber from Northern Ireland who has provided feedback that, both in volume and quality, surpasses anything we could have imagined. UK and EU subscribers will be particularly appreciative of this user’s eye for detail. In addition to prompting us to repair issues related EU date formats and the proper display of the British pound, said subscriber made suggestions leading to improvements to the manner in which AcuInvoice handles non-US addresses. Subscribers in the UK, Canada, and Australia will now find a pre-populated pull down menu having a variety of provinces/regions available for selection. We will be tweaking this feature a bit more, but it is far improved over that which was included in the previous iteration. Additionally, it was suggested that users be allowed to disable the printing of logos; this excellent suggestion, which shall soon be be implemented, will allow subscribers to print to their own letterhead without duplicating their logo. Lastly, thanks to his inquiry, we posted a description of how to disable the display of URLs and other header/footer information when invoices are printed. We thank you, sir, for your feedback and promise to buy the Guinness when next we’re in Ireland.

AcuInvoice Goes International

AcuInvoice has gained an international foothold. In addition to a large number of accounts in the US and Canada, we now have several subscribers from the UK, Australia, South Africa, Taiwan, and Iran. This Kentuckian was even shocked to see someone from a place called Tennessee. If our international subscribers would like to see AcuInvoice translated into their mother tongue, please post a ticket or indicate as much in the user forum. Multi-language support is coming soon, so please send us your language requests.

Share This

We’ve had a number of upgrades, features releases, and bug fixes this week, so we thought it appropriate to highlight the key updates implemented over the past several days. If you have any questions or comments, post here or simply email us at support (at) acuinvoice (dot) com.

User Forums Launched

The most immediately noticeable addition to the AcuInvoice site is the launch of the user forums. Accessible via the rightmost tab of the marketing site’s persistent navigation area, the user forum will become the go-to place for user questions, feature requests, discussions related to the API, and general chat. Rather than posting every detail of our progress on this blog, interested readers will be able to more closely track development by reading and posting on the relevant forum.

API Released

By far the most technically significant feature released, the AcuInvoice API will provide a platform by which developers can extend AcuInvoice’s functionality. I wrote about the merits of API-based extensibility at Luc Latulippe’s illustration blog. As an aside, I challenge you to find a more gifted artist that Luc—really incredible work.

Flooded By Feedback

We’ve started receiving a significant amount of feedback from our users and it is really helping us identify issues that we had missed in our internal testing. Thanks!!! We would like to encourage you to submit feature requests via the newly released forums, while continuing to post tickets or email us directly if you have identified what appears to be a bug. If you have not yet accessed our helpdesk system, you can quickly submit a ticket to the AcuInvoice help desk by clicking the link in the upper right of your account. This system will allow you to track the request or bug report and will automatically notify you when we have resolved your issue. User requests submitted via the helpdesk will be acknowledged—and frequently resolved—within one business day.

Newfangled Login Area

Ben Gray (of openswitch.org fame) implemented the fancy JavaScript login shelf that is included on all parts of the marketing site save the user forum. Ben will be regularly featured here and I encourage readers to check back soon for some exciting announcements related to his involvement with our company.

Waive Late Fee

Late fees, though often added to invoices, are frequently not collected. We have therefore added a feature that allows you to easily waive the remaining late fee on an invoice. This will prevent you from having to go in and edit an invoice to correct for what might be an annoyingly small late fee.

Streamlined Country Selection

Country menus have been streamlined such that those countries in which the majority of our users reside will appear higher on the list. We need to update this to include Australia. Next week we will be implementing similar updates to the currency menus.

CSS Updates Begin

For the next several weeks, the most visible change to AcuInvoice will be updates to the CSS of the application and marketing site. A small preview of this started this past week, when Ben started to apply a new CSS class to required fields in the signup process. Ben will be working on perfecting our look and feel over the next several weeks, so if you have any comments on this topic, please feel free to email us, post a comment here, or start a thread on the user forum.

Monitoring Service Added

We have implemented a network monitoring service to ensure that we are immediately notified in the event of a server outage. We will soon be extending this to include automatic high frequency tests for MySQL connectivity.

Share This

The AcuInvoice development team is pleased to announce the initial public release of the AcuInvoice application programming interface (API) and PHP client library. The AcuInvoice API allows developers to build applications that securely access and manage their AcuInvoice data. Possible applications include integration with third party shopping carts, integration with third party accounting packages, and more. We have extensive documentation and sample code (to be posted shortly), but wanted to provide a consolidated summary of topics germane to this API and its future plans.

Access

The AcuInvoice API is open to all AcuInvoice subscribers. We currently have no plans to restrict API access based on account type. To use the AcuInvoice API you will need an access key. As of this writing, said key has magically appeared in the My Account→Preferences area of your account. Keep your API key safe. If you share it with the world, some nefarious pack of geeks might do something naughty with it. If you ever suspect that your API key has been compromised, simply change your master account password and an new API key will be automatically generated for you.

Security

AcuInvoice API communications are transmitted via XML and secured via HTTPS; requests made over non-encrypted connections will not be served. Additionally, if you have mapped a domain to AcuInvoice (if you haven’t, you know you want to), note that for purposes of data encryption you will have to access the AcuInvoice API at https://yourid.acuinvoice.com/api/ rather than at http://www.yourdomain.com/api/.

PHP Client Library

Our PHP client library is complete and can be downloaded at the URL conveniently located beneath your API key. Technical requirements for the library include PHP 5 compiled with SimpleXML and cURL. Documentation is included with the client library.

Forthcoming Additions

This 0.1 release is strong and has intentionally been structured such that the API’s scope and data formats are familiar to anyone who has developed applications using our competitors’ APIs. However, we believe that the AcuInvoice API can and should do more. To this end, we will be adding additional functionality to the AcuInvoice API as it becomes available. We welcome your suggestions.

API Developer Forum and Code Repository

We encourage API developers to join the AcuInvoice forum (just opened yesterday, so we’d love to have people join) to discuss API development issues and to let us know what you’d like to achieve with the API. If you have developed code that you believe has broad use, and which you don’t mind sharing with fellow API developers, we would be happy to promote your work and serve as a repository for this code.

Thanks

Lastly, we want to thank all of our early adopters for their support as we continue to release features and upgrades. We love hearing back from you and encourage you to continue to contacting us with your constructive criticisms. We’re working to make this the best application in this space and we can’t do it without feedback from you, our subscribers. Please feel free to contact us at support (at) acuinvoice (dot) com with any questions.

Share This

This evening we will be working on implementing an AcuInvoice user forum.  There is a chance that portions of the AcuInvoice marketing site will be down for maintenance.  Users will still be able to access their AcuInvoice accounts using:

1. Their unique URL (https://yourcompany.acuinvoice.com) or
2. A mapped domain, if you have implemented this feature.  

We apologize for the possible interruption, but it is the price of progress!

Share This

In this post we will extend on our prior discussion on domain mapping by demonstrating how to map an entire domain to your AcuInvoice account. This feature can be used if you want to point a domain to your AcuInvoice account and, in so doing, more tightly manage your brand and strengthen your company’s identity. As we previously demonstrated, domain mapping entails two processes: 1) making minor modifications to your AcuInvoice account followed by 2) updating the DNS records for your domain.

Step 1: Update AcuInvoice Settings

The first part of the process—updating your settings in AcuInvoice—informs AcuInvoice that you would like to map a domain to your account and initiates a series of behind-the-scene scripts necessary to prepare your account for domain mapping. To complete this step, simply enter a fully qualified domain name (http://www.yourdomain.com/) in the “Domain Mapping” field in My Account à Preferences, save your settings, and you are finished. Alternately, this step can now be completed during the registration process.

Step 2: Point Your Domain to AcuInvoice

Having completed the process on the application side, you now have a choice of two options for pointing your domain to your account. The simplest method entails using the AcuInvoice name servers. A slightly more advanced option allows you to use your own name servers, but requires that you make some minor changes to your domain’s DNS zone.

Method #1: Use the AcuInvoice Name Servers

The simplest method of pointing a domain to your AcuInvoice account entails using the AcuInvoice name servers. To do this, simply login to your domain registrar and update your domain such that the following name servers are used:

1. NS1.ACUINVOICE.COM
2. NS2.ACUINVOICE.COM

Once you save your settings, it can take up to 24 hours for the name server changes to propagate and for you to be able to access your AcuInvoice account at yourdomain.com. The primary benefit of this first method is its simplicity; this approach can literally be implemented in 5 minutes from start to finish. The downside of this method is that you will no longer manage the domain’s DNS zone. The consequence of this is that you would not be able to do things such as point your MX record to a mail server of your choice. Therefore, method #1 is most appropriately used when you want to dedicate a domain for your AcuInvoice installation and don’t care about any other services that might be associated with the domain (MX settings, subdomains, FTP servers, etc.).

Method #2: Use Your Own Name Servers and Modify Your DNS Zone

The second method allows you to point a domain to AcuInvoice while retaining the ability to manage other services associated with your domain. The process here is almost identical to our discussion of mapping a subdomain to AcuInvoice, so we will be borrowing heavily from our prior post, making only minor modifications where necessary. In our example, yourdomain.com is registered and hosted with GoDaddy and we have the ability to update the DNS settings using GoDaddy’s Total DNS Management tool. To access this DNS manager, we login to GoDaddy, navigate to the Domain Control Center for yourdomain.com and click the link that says “Total DNS Control and MX Records.” Once in the Total DNS Control Panel, make the following additions to point yourdomain.com to your AcuInvoice installation:

1. Create an A record directing yourdomain.com to 66.7.206.66, the AcuInvoice shared IP address.
2. Add a CNAME record pointing www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com.

The new entries will say “Pending Setup” and you will be presented with a message notifying you that it can take 24-48 hours for the settings to take effect. Though sometimes true, our changes propagated in about an hour. That’s it. We have successfully yourdomain.com to an AcuInvoice account. As soon as the changes propagate, our account can be accessed at yourdomain.com. The major benefit of Method #2 is that you retain the ability to manage your domain’s DNS zone. Combined with our previous discussion of subdomain mapping, you now have a variety of options that allow you to carefully manage your brand and retaining AcuInvoice’s ease of use. If you have any questions about this post, please post a comment, submit a ticket from within your AcuInvoice account, or simply email us at support (at) acuinvoice (dot) com.

Share This

Today we are pleased to announce support for domain mapping. Domain mapping is an advanced feature that allows subscribers to point a domain or subdomain to an AcuInvoice account. When coupled with an appropriately customized invoice template, domain mapping enables you to closely manage your company’s identity and more tightly integrate AcuInvoice with your existing web property. Overall, your clients will be impressed with the professional look and you’ll feel an enormous sense of accomplishment for having achieved something so profoundly geeky. In this post, we’ll demonstrate how to map a subdomain to AcuInvoice (we will show how to map an entire domain in a subsequent post) and get you started down the path towards incorporating AcuInvoice with your existing website.

Expanding Your Options

Before we delve into our detailed description, we would like to emphasize that domain mapping is a supplement to—not a replacement for—your standard AcuInvoice login areas. In other words, if you map a domain to AcuInvoice, you will be able to access your account from subdomain.yourdomain.com in addition to your unique AcuInvoice URL (yourid.acuinvoice.com) and the persistent login area in the header of the marketing site.

Requirements

1. An AcuInvoice account that supports domain mapping. Beta Tester accounts obviously support this. Following the beta period, however, a paid account will be necessary to utilize this advanced feature.
2. A domain name and access to DNS management utilities.

The Scenario

In the following scenario, we will illustrate how to map a domain to AcuInvoice using contractlive.com, a domain we’ve had in our GoDaddy account for some time, but which isn’t otherwise being used. In this example, a subscriber wants to maintain a public website at contractlive.com while letting http://acuinvoice.contractlive.com point to his AcuInvoice installation. To enable this functionality, we must first update some settings in our AcuInvoice account, then make minor modifications to the domain’s DNS zone. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Update AcuInvoice Settings

Enabling domain mapping in AcuInvoice entails a single step and takes mere seconds to implement. Once logged into your AcuInvoice account, navigate to My Account→Preferences, enter the subdomain you wish to map to AcuInvoice (http://acuinvoice.contractlive.com/), and save the settings. Alternately, if you are creating a new AcuInvoice account, you now have the opportunity to enter this information as part of the registration process.

Step 2: Modify Your DNS Zone

In our example, contractlive.com is registered and hosted with GoDaddy and we have the ability to update the DNS settings using GoDaddy’s Total DNS Management tool. To access this DNS manager, we login to GoDaddy, navigate to the Domain Control Center for contractlive.com and click the link that says “Total DNS Control and MX Records.” Once in the Total DNS Control Panel, we make the following additions to point acuinvoice.contractlive.com to our AcuInvoice installation:

1. Create an A record directing acuinvoice.contractlive.com to 66.7.206.66, the AcuInvoice shared IP address.
2. Add a CNAME record pointing www.acuinvoice.contractlive.com to acuinvoice.contractlive.com.

The new entries will say “Pending Setup” and you will be presented with a message notifying you that it can take 24-48 hours for the settings to take effect. Though sometimes true, our changes propagated in about an hour. That’s it. We have successfully mapped acuinvoice.contractlive.com to an AcuInvoice account. As soon as the changes propagate, our account can be accessed at acuinvoice.contractlive.com. In the coming days we will provide a similar description on mapping an entire domain to AcuInvoice. Meanwhile, if you have any questions about domain mapping, please post a comment, submit a ticket from within your AcuInvoice account, or simply email us at support (at) acuinvoice (dot) com.

Share This

We will be rolling out additional features over the coming days and wanted to provide a release schedule for two items that will interest some of our subscribers.

Domain Mapping

Domain mapping will be released tomorrow. This feature will allow you to point yourdomain.com or subdomain.yourdomain.com to your AcuInvoice account. We have some last minute items to address and are drafting an explanation of the steps required to map a domain to AcuInvoice. Look for a detailed blog post concurrent with tomorrow’s release of this feature. If you have interest in mapping a domain to your AcuInvoice installation, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at support (at) acuinvoice (dot) com and we will be more than happy to guide you through this process.

AcuInvoice API

As previously mentioned, the first version of the AcuInvoice API is complete and is undergoing internal testing. We are finalizing documentation and sample code and have scheduled the initial release of the AcuInvoice API for October 18th. Concurrent with the release, we will be making available a PHP client library. If you are a developer and have interest in possibly using the AcuInvoice API, we would love to hear from you.

Share This

This evening we will be making improvements to the persistent login area in the header of the marketing site.  We apologize in advance for the disruption. Subscribers will still be able to access their AcuInvoice account by navigating to http://your-acuinvoice-id.acuinvoice.com/

Share This

Today we are pleased to announce the initial public release of AcuInvoice. AcuInvoice is a web-based application for estimating and invoicing clients and is ideal for small office/home office environments. Though we will soon have multiple product plans, we are inviting the public to sign-up for our free Early Adopter plan. Though work remains to be done, we feel pretty good about the current state of this application and look forward to constructive criticisms from the public. Early Adopters will have complete access to this application until at least January 1. 2008—possibly longer. When AcuInvoice reaches a 1.0 state, subscribers will have the option of either switching to our free plan or going to one of several affordable paid plans. We ask for your patience over the coming days as we add new features and implement some last minute changes to the marketing site.

Many Thanks

Before I go into an overview of AcuInvoice’s features and our plans for the near future, I’d like to thank several parties for their support. First, I would like to thank the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation (KSTC) for having the confidence to see value not only in AcuInvoice, but in our broader development plans as well. This effort would not have been possible without KSTC’s guidance and financial support; we look forward to working with them on subsequent development efforts. Next, we would like to thank the individuals who have participated in the private beta testing of AcuInvoice. Your feedback has been valuable and has helped keep us focused on our top priority: our customers. In particular, I would like to give a big public thanks to Ronald Heft, who went out of his way to provide quality feedback on AcuInvoice. Ronald, we appreciate your help and will be working diligently to address the outstanding issues you have identified. Last, I’d like to thank the entire AcuInvoice development team. It has been a real pleasure working with all of you and I thank you for your efforts.

Key Features of AcuInvoice

AcuInvoice is feature-rich, so I’m only going to point out the high level features.

1. Simple invoicing and estimating. AcuInvoice is fundamentally a tool for managing invoices and estimates. It has a simple interface for managing the full life-cycle of an invoice.
2. Integration with PayPal, 2checkout.com, and Authorize.net. Simply enter in your account information for one of these services, and you will be able to receive payment via credit cards. Once payment is received, invoices will be automatically retired by AcuInvoice.
3. Track receipt of invoices. If you’ve been in businesses, you’re familiar with the “I didn’t receive the invoice” line. AcuInvoice has been designed in a manner that allows you to detect the actual receipt of invoices. We believe this will help speed the receipt of payment.
4. Organize invoices. Invoices are categorized into one of several states (estimate, draft, open, closed, past due) and can be labeled with one or more tags to help you stay organized.
5. Manage contacts. AcuInvoice is outfitted with a user friendly contact manager. You can add contacts individually or import them en masses through a structured CSV file. We will soon be adding support for the vCard format.
6. Design your own invoice. CSS gurus can play around with our sample CSS file to create custom invoices. Upload your logo to AcuInvoice to have it included on your invoices and estimates.
7. Multiple users. AcuInvoice has Master and Junior level users, thereby allowing you to delegate tasks to colleagues without giving them access to your account. Our beta tester plan currently supports two additional users.
8. Reports. AcuInvoice comes with several reporting tools built in. We plan on strengthening this functionality considerably over the coming weeks.

Forthcoming Features

1. Domain mapping. Let’s say you are running a consulting business and would like to maintain tight control over your brand. Domain mapping will allow you to point yourdomain.com or billing.yourdomain.com to your installation of AcuInvoice. We think this feature will be useful for those who want to present a more integrated look with their invoicing application.
2. An API and PHP client library. We actually have this developed already, but are finishing up the documentation and sample code. Look for this API in the very near future.
3. Multi-language support (MLS). Again, MLS is already engineered into AcuInvoice. We simply have to finalize the textual content of the application and marketing site, and have the actual translations performed. Our initial goal is to launch in Spanish, French, and German. If you have additional language requests (or if you would like to assist in translating into another language), please contact us at support (at) acuinvoice (dot) com.
4. A more robust tax system. We will soon be launching a flexible tax system that will significantly improve upon that which our competitors offer.
5. Support for services such as Google Checkout, Amazon FPS, and others.

We could go on and on about the features of this application, but at this point, we think it best to simply let you use the software and let us know what you think. If you have any issues, you can either email us at support (at) acuinvoice (dot) com, or submit a ticket by clicking the “report a bug” link in the upper right hand side of the application. We thank you for your interest and look forward to earning your business.

Share This