CompassBill

Automation Inauguration

2010-10-07T17:27:00.000-07:00

To connect, automate, and simplify the billing process

If we were to boil everything about CompassBill down to the simplest possible unit, this is what it should look like. This idea defines what we do here. Anything that doesn't fulfill this vision, even if it may be arguably useful, just isn't true to our application.

Version 1.3 of CompassBill continues is finely tuned to this vision, particularly simplification and automation. Continuing what we started by leaving out late fees*, we have removed statements as well. In addition, we've simplified our menu, making it quicker to get to the most important sections of CompassBill. Even our newest features, our automated invoice generation and reminders, were kept simple.

Speaking of automation, this release marks our next big step towards satisfying the second part of our vision. What started with recurring charges has been expanded to automatically generating invoices and emailing reminders to customers.With this powerful, yet simple, features added to CompassBill, you can generate invoices and improve your accounts receivable turnaround while sound asleep, giving you more time to build and expand your business.

We invite you to login to CompassBill and try out these powerful new features. Automated invoice generation, recurring charges, and automated reminders are accessed from the new Automation tab on the menu. As always we welcome any feedback. Here at CompassBill, you are rest assured that whether you wish to compliment or complain about us, you'll be talking to a developer.

Oh, and about the first part of our vision? Stay tuned.

* Yes, we're aware that post has a somewhat different "one point vision". Our new one is a clearer distillation of our vision, and we reserve the right to refactor our vision, as we do to refactor our code. So there.

Customer Bill Payment Now Available

2010-09-17T09:39:00.000-07:00

Getting paid faster is always a good thing. When we developed CompassBill, one of our primary goals was to streamline the process of invoice creation all the way through to receiving a payment. Today, we are excited to announce that we have implemented Customer Bill Payment into CompassBill.

Enabling Customer Bill Payment will place a link in both the e-mail and PDF invoice that your customer can click. The customer will then be presented with an invoice and a Pay Now button. Each link is uniquely coded for your customer's invoice so there is no login or password required.

We have chosen PayPal as our first payment gateway provider. We believe PayPal offers an excellent value to small businesses and brand name familiarity. Your customers will be able to pay with either an existing PayPal account or by using a Credit Card, even if they do not have a PayPal account established.

Customer Bill Payment is available today with PayPal accounts and can be enabled from the settings screen in your CompassBill account.

Conversations with CompassBillers

2010-09-06T17:58:00.000-07:00

Being an early adopter is fun. You get to try out things that few others are using, and get to brag when you adopt something that later takes off. Sometimes you get to play a role in shaping the product, before the volume of feedback makes it less personal. Best of all, when you talk to the company who created the product, you are likely talking to those who created it.

Thus, it is with great excitement that us at CompassBill announce our new live chat feature. Found both on the front page of http://www.compassbill.net and inside the application itself, live chat is designed to get you in touch with the people who work on CompassBill instantly. So whether you have a question for us, a feature you'd like to see, or a suggestion on how we might improve CompassBill, please feel free to fire up a chat session. We'll be glad to chat.

In addition to the live chat, we've also added the ability for users to pay their bills through PayPal. This useful feature adds convenience to customers and gets revenue to you sooner. In addition, we've added pagination to the invoices page, and will be adding it to the other pages over the next few months. Please check back later for information about these new features.

What's (Not) Inside CompassBill

2010-03-30T19:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Don't Be A Tom Sawyer Developer

2010-03-26T18:55:00.000-07:00

From the title of this post, you might think I am referring to the famous whitewashing incident in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. While that story certainly could apply to a developer, I am referring to the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

For those who aren't familiar with the story, I am referring to Tom and Huck's plan to break runaway slave Jim out of captivity. All things considered, a very simple and easy plan could have been executed to get Jim out. Instead, the plan becomes needlessly complicated, involves an amazing amount of additional work, and almost results in getting Tom killed.

Why did they go to so much trouble when a simpler plan would have worked? Because Tom felt the simple way wasn't an honorable way to spring a prisoner. According to his understanding of the process from reading books such as The Man in the Iron Mask and other classics, a breakout had to be complicated and harrowing. Thus instead of a one night job, it became a mess full of "pet" spiders and snakes, cobbled together shovels and knifes, and a rope ladder baked into a pie.

As a developer, I must admit that far too often I've fallen into the trap of "complicated = better". Like other people, overcoming complicated situations make me feel good, even if some of those complications could have been avoided. Sometimes these complications come about because of a desire to do it right, to follow what a book or what conventional wisdom says is the right way. Often times this takes longer than a simpler, if inelegant, solution was taken, and is rarely ever better than the simple solution.

The ideal application gets from point A to point B in a straight line. While this may be an unrealistic level of simplicity to always reach, it is certainly a wise goal. It is the driving principle behind CompassBill, and the cornerstone tenet of CompassWare. So with all due respect to Mr. Sawyer, we feel the simple way is plenty honorable.

What's Inside CompassBill: Products and Services

2010-03-24T20:53:00.000-07:00

Because billing is a task that should take as little time as possible. If more time is spent on sending invoices, keeping track of overdue accounts, and recording charges, less time is available to spend time on your actual line of work. Minimizing the amount of time spent on billing is crucial to our business, and is the core principle behind CompassBill. This is the basis for the Products and Services area of CompassBill.

First off, lets be clear what Products and Services in CompassBill is not. It isn't an inventory management system. If you are in need of this feature, there are many other great applications out there for that purpose. CompassBill is for invoicing, and our experience comes from a service business background.

So what is the purpose of Products and Services? Quite simply, to make entering customer charges quicker.

For example, say you are a web developer. Assume for the purposes of this example that you have already added a couple of services, including one which is "Ultra Deluxe Starter Site". You've just finished a UDSS (your company likes using a lot of acronyms), and want to charge AngelFish, Inc. for this. On the add charge screen, you could type this in manually, add the price manually, and apply any taxes that are applicable manually. This doesn't take long, but if you are doing this many times a month, it can get tedious.

Fortunately, you took the time to set up a list of your products and services. Just select the item from the "Product" dropdown menu, and it will populate the other fields for you. At this point, you can update the fields as necessary, and save the charge. With two clicks, you have saved the charge. Now, you can get your billing done sooner, and get to work building a great site for Angel Fish!

Coming Soon to a CompassBill Near You

2010-03-15T14:16:00.000-07:00

We are proud of our initial version of CompassBill. It is a powerful yet simple application that reduces clutter and time spent on billing. In its current state it is a very useful tool for any small business.

However, we are always looking to make the product better and more responsive to the needs of today's busy entrepreneur. As the owners of a small business, we realize how many things have to be accomplished in a very limited amount of time. Time spent on an overhead task like billing can't be used for generating new clients, or finishing a project.

Accordingly, we have decided to focus our latest development on automation of the invoicing process and developing an iPhone app. Automation will decrease the amount of time spent each month on invoicing to mere minutes. Building an app for the iPhone is an important step in making CompassBill friendly for businesses who operate in the field and need to post a quick charge for a client, or to retrieve a client's billing info quickly.

We are currently in the process of developing these additions to CompassBill, and will be regularly updating on the progress of these exciting projects on this blog. Please check back regularly, and be sure to keep an eye on CompassBill.net. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback on CompassBill.

www.compassbill.net

Invoicing our web design clients made us re-think billing software

2010-03-09T20:27:00.000-08:00

As a web developer for over 10 years, one of our most time consuming tasks in trying to run a small business was billing clients. We quickly discovered that in the real world, if you bill a customer $19.95 for hosting, they may send you $20, 13 days late after you have already sent the next invoice, all while you have 3 open projects for that customer and their domain renewal is approaching.

In our office, multiple web designers work on many projects at a time and keeping billing simple for us was just as important as keeping it simple for our customers. We wanted to get paid on-time and to do so, our customers needed to get billed on-time, accurately and in a manner they could understand.

Like many other business we started with Excel and grew into Quickbooks. We messed around with some online tools, but ultimately it was difficult to see how we were ever going to scale our billing as we grew. Quick Books wasn't cutting it. Sure, it was fine for keeping the books, but for invoicing clients, it just didn't do what we needed it to do.

Managing invoices online was the primary goal when we decided to build CompassBill. We actually developed two online billing solutions for our own use before we embarked on CompassBill. Each iteration helped us to determine which features we wanted and which we didn't.

I like to think that we designed it to meet the demands of our toughest clients. We just always seemed to have the hand full of people that did quirky things that we couldn't fit into a billing system. So, CompassBill was really beyond just another way to send an invoice, it was a think tank project in usability, diving into the scenarios we faced on a daily basis.

You think when you build a payment screen that the customer will pay what they owe, but they don't always do that. Sometimes a line item charge is disputed. Sometimes it was easier for the customer to mail $20 than $19.95. While I won't turn down a free nickel, that free nickel made a big mess of the billing system. Sometimes, you get half a payment and sometimes you don't get any payment. Sometimes you let something slide until next billing period and sometimes you owe the customer some credit for a mistake. Sometimes employees forget to put their time in before the invoice goes out.

As a web developer and business owner, I wanted to focus on building web sites and keeping customers happy. Building an invoicing system that could automate as much as possible was a priority with CompassBill and we continue to improve those aspects as we get customer feedback. When billing is under control, there is an immediate calming feeling that things are progressing. Even better, customers pay faster when things are consistent and easy to understand.

www.compassbill.net