We heart feedback: improvements to the Account Overview

by Melina Stathopoulos | August 16/2012 | account overview, product news

A few weeks ago we introduced a new way for you to see key account information in FreshBooks with the new Account Overview, featuring dashboard-style panels and graphs that give you a snapshot of your business. We are grateful that many of you took time out to share your feedback on the changes, and we’ve released a series of updates which incorporate many of your suggestions.

Here’s a rundown of the improvements we’ve made to your Account Overview, based on your feedback:

1. Customization: Hide/Show/Rearrange panels as you wish

A popular request was for the ability to customize the layout of the Overview. Now you can hide and show individual panels, as well as rearrange their order on the page so that your most important stuff can go up top.

Mouse over the top of any panel on the right-hand side to see the hide/show controls. Click to drag it up and down along the page. Enjoy!

2. See your unbilled hours and quickly generate invoices

You also asked to see unbilled hours for active projects. You can now find this in the Active Project panel, and clicking the number takes you to your Timesheet Details report (filtered by unbilled hours).

You can also see unbilled hours on a per-project basis by rolling over any project name in this panel (this total links to the corresponding project page). As a bonus, you will find a “Generate Invoice” button in this rollover, so you can quickly bill for those unbilled hours!

3. Quickly add payments to your outstanding invoices

Yep, you got it: we’ve added a shortcut for adding payments to your outstanding invoices right from the Overview page. Less clicking = happiness!

4. Shortcut to your Accounts Aging report

Sometimes it’s the little things that matter the most! We’ve brought back the shortcut link to the Accounts Aging report–you can find it on the Outstanding Invoices panel. The Accounts Aging report can also be accessed from the Reports tab.

http://www.designwebprint.net.au Melissa Smith

I absolutely love FreshBooks. After bring referred by a client, I am loving the advantages of your system. Everything in one place and minimal paperwork or calculating time. A cheaper option would be awesome though. As a small business with very low income at the moment, another plan would be awesome.
simon browning

loving the home page updates. One thing that would be really great would be a checkbox on the invoices & expenses chart to indicate whether taxes should be a part of the totals or not.
http://www.corysilva.com coryasilva

As a consultant I have found Freshbooks indispensable. Time tracking per project, almost instant invoice generation, reports, integration with expensify, and price!!! I usually do not care for cloud services but freshbooks is at the same caliber as Amazon EC3 or Dropbox.
http://www.dixpatch.com Guillaume Bleau

We love working with Freshbooks but even with the new cloud accounting name, we can’t use it for this purpose until we see some account reconciliation options like we have right now in XERO. Are you planning to implement this in the future?
Momentum

Excellent enhancements – thanks for keeping us updated!
http://TheSmallBizCloudCompany.com jimi mikusi

lots of great new stuff! keep it up.

but as most of us small biz owners/freelancers are extremely mobile i’m dying for an official mobile app putting all these great things in my palm for access *while* working rather than trying to remember things after providing services.

imho- you have to be “mobile” to really embrace the cloud.
Peter Ghosh

I’ve been a FreshBooks customer for over 7 months now and it is an invaluable tool. One more thing it’s missing – adding categories that map directly to IRS tax categories along with a report that generates a Schedule C for tax form entry.
http://www.impactbattery.com george zeed

I’m so happy to hear about the updates. It was good but now it is just so much better. I appreciate that you listen to feedback!
http://startupgrowthexpert.com Vinil Ramdev

would love to see an update that has “cash outflow” along with expenses. Because a lot of times, we make cash outflows that are not categorized as expenses.
Hanna Griesbach

I love freshbooks and have used the last update. Thanks!
http://www.bnbtobacco.com/ Elliot Boudin

I agree with Vinil’s post about the “cash outflow”. That would be a nice feature.
http://www.phoenixwood.co.nz Jamie

Love freshbooks. The one thing I would like to see would be to able to put invoices on hold e.g for when a invoice is disputed or payment arrangements are to be made etc. That we help my business alot.
http://pachecolandscapeandpool.com Cris

I have been using Freshbooks a couple years and its pretty good for the service industry. But there is one improvement that I would LOVE to see. In the recurring profiles it would be nice if we could add a charge to a customers invoice for a set number of future invoices, then it automatically reverts back to the normal charge. I have customers that are billed the same price every month, but some months they add an extra service or buy something extra. Its a pain to have to edit the profiles 2 times to achieve this effect.
Jon

I would LOVE if an email address was not required for a client. I end up using my own email address for clients who don’t have email addresses. Am I missing something? Is there a way to not require an email???
Josh

You just don’t get it. Removing the quick overview of the last three months trading figures, for revenue, what’s been collected, what’s still owing and what’s been billed is the single biggest feature of your product. It’s like the magnet. It is such a powerful overview to be able to see the numbers and know exactly how you are tracking in under a few seconds. Removing this feature is the worst move in the history of your company. I just don’t understand why you would ignore great feedback and go ahead and destroy your company. I hope you take this feedback seriously. As an entrepreneur that helps 1000′s of small businesses, the one thing i know is that they don’t know their numbers. This forced upgrade is nothing short of a disgrace.
http://Www.holistec.co.nz Mike

Agree with Josh. Do NOT take away the summary of trading figures.
http://www.freshbooks.com/our-team.php#melina Melina Stathopoulos

@Josh, @Mike: Thanks for your comments. We know how important those figures are, and we have not actually taken them away!

The ‘Invoices & Expenses’ graph shows a visual representation of those figures so you can easily compare them month over month. But! If you want the straight figures for any particular month on their own, you can get them by hovering over that section of the graph (including Invoiced, Received, Outstanding, and Expensed).

This way you can visualize your business’ performance and get the straight figures for the last six months rather than just the last three. I hope this helps!
http://www.FortMacRentals.com Aaron Winsor

Please create a designated app just for taking pictures of receipts and background uploading them (with in phone backup but not in the camera roll).

I’m very excited about your expanding services such as the bank statement expense reports.
http://www.freshbooks.com/our-team.php#melina Melina Stathopoulos

@Aaron Winsor: Do you have an iPhone? If so, you can use our new iPhone app to take pictures of your receipts and attach them to your expenses on the fly (even if you’re currently offline, the expense and receipt will get submitted to FreshBooks the next time you go online). http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2012/08/28/introducing-the-new-freshbooks-app-for-iphone/

Images you take with the app are automatically saved to your Camera Roll, but since FreshBooks is a cloud service, as soon as your image is submitted it is automatically backed up by FreshBooks too, so you’ll always have it.

I hope this helps, and thanks for commenting!