What's (Not) Inside CompassBill

Do it simple, do it quick, and do it well

This is the core philosophy for our apps here at CompassWare. We develop tools to make the small business owner's day easier, because we are small business owners. We have enough to worry about without a clunky and complicated application preventing us from conducting business.

Because of this, our applications may not have every feature a business owner could want at any time in their businesses development. For example, CompassBill is centered around our needs for an invoicing system, not the hypothetical needs we (or a customer) might have at some point in the future. The features that are there are there because we needed them, so we are sure how they should work.

Even if a feature is useful, that doesn't mean it should be in the application. The feature may be way too complicated, canceling out whatever benefit it may have. In the worst case, it may even completely mess us the ease of use of the entire app.

An example of this were late fees. A feature for handling late fees was useful, and was something at one point we intended to include in CompassBill. However, once we got into it, we realized implementing the feature as good as we would want it would add additional complication, with only marginal benefit. In addition, we were fast approaching our go live date, and were left with a bad choice. Either finish the late fees and sacrifice other areas (such as PDF invoice generation), or delay the launch to implement a complicated and shaky feature.

Instead of taking either of those bad paths, we decided upon a third route. We decided to completely leave late fees out entirely. It wasn't a core feature of our application (unlike PDF invoice generation), and delaying our launch was unacceptable. It wasn't the easiest decision to make, but it was the best, and we have no regrets doing this.

Might late fees someday be part of CompassBill? It's possible, especially if our own needs make it a necessity. But if we do decide to implement late fees, it won't be done without keeping to our standards of usability and quality. That's just the way we do it here at CompassWare.