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.

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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.

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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!

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