Acuinvoice

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.

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