Back in January when we were hammering out what features would make the cut for Blinksale 2.0, we began to joke about the crazy, over-the-top, web 2.0 "hype" features we could add to Blinksale to stir the buzz. Of course, this discussion was entirely in jest as topics veered from social-invoicing to Google Map API integration (so clients could find your office directly from your invoice). I'm sure there's a place for these ideas somewhere, but they were simply good for a laugh around here.
Then I joked about how we could add "Invoice Tagging" to Blinksale. And about how you could tag invoices with terms like "hosting" or "advertising" or "web-design" or "reimbursement". Or how you could even tag an invoice with a sales-person's name. And then you could simply filter your invoices by tag to see the sales associated with that tag. We joked about tag clouds where the text size was determined by dollar amount billed, not simply number of invoices.
And we laughed and laughed, and commented about how everyone would think that Blinksale had jumped the shark, totally biting into the hype-machine. We laughed hard. Tears in fact.
Then the laughing slowly came to a halt.
And the debate began. Will people think we're insane? Are we contributing to software bloat? Will the community give us grief for adding such fluff to the Blink? Or, is tagging possibly the most amazing "less software" approach to letting Blinksale subscribers organize and track their sales in almost any way imaginable.
We don't have any desire to go head-to-head with a traditional "double-entry" financial software package like Quickbooks, where sales items must belong to rigid "accounts" that must all be tied together. There's a place for this, for sure. It's called Quickbooks (or MYOB, if that's your thing). But it's not Blinksale. We have no desire to build a category system, and we really don't even have a desire to build an inventory system (boring). But with tags, we can let Blinksale subscribers sort, track, and organize their invoices however they want to. It's like the Burger King way.
If I want to know how much in icon sales Brian brought in last year, I simply filter "brian+icons" with 2005 as my date range. Easy as pie. Or, if I'd like to know how much we did in t-shirt sales, I can filter the tag "threads". We think it's going to be a very valuable, even though a bit hype-ish, addition to Blinksale.
At SXSW, during the Tagging 2.0 panel, Prentiss Riddle of Pluck said that "tags are great but I wouldn't want to manage money with them." We love the folks at Pluck (a client of ours), but we have to part ways with Prentiss on this one. There may be more to tags in a business sense than we all originally thought. As a side note, Prentiss' thoughts on tagging as a whole were really great, and you would benefit to check out his notes from the panel.
So there you have it: Invoice tagging. Coming in days to Blinksale 2.0. Please keep the buzz to a minimum. We don't want things to get out of hand. ;-) And no, this is not the super unnamed feature some have been talking about. There is still more fun yet to be had.
Tim says
I think this is a great feature! In a blink (!) of an eye, you see wich parts make your account tick. Maybe it even points you to things wich never cough your attention before, like: "Hey, actually, I'm selling a sh*tload of icons, maybe I want to consider making this my main activity" (or not, just an example)
I'm looking forward for more of these fresh ideas!
Anonymous Coward says
Seems like being able to simply see how much money you made in a month would be a better start for feature enhancement than tagging. Blinksale has been around for a year and I needed to pull out a calculator and click dozens of times to do my taxes. Thanks.
Phil says
Shut up about 2.0 and release it already!
Josh Wand says
But how much tagging will be manual tagging of each invoice, and how much much will be dependent on, say, line items and clients? Could we, say, automatically tag certain recurring line items with a tag or tags, or have a client imply another particular tag or tags? Maybe in 2.5...
...ever notice that "2.0" rhymes with "godot"?
Josh Williams says
Coward - I know. It's a pain. Monthly totals were the first feature added to 2.0. No worries, we didn't overlook the obvious stuff.
Phil - Duly noted. This should be my last yap before it's released.
Josh - Your thinking is right on. Probably not for 2.0 as you mentioned, but eventually some form of "smart-tagging" is the way to go.
Luke Blackman says
Honestly I think the way you found such a concept humourous at first illustrates the vulnerability for industries (like web-based ones have emerged as) to become caught up in their own arrogant esoterics and lose sight of more meaningul purpose. Nevertheless.. I love Blinksale, and think this will be a great addition to the product! Looking forward to seeing this implemented, guys.
Luke
louis says
tagging invoices? i am sorry but i think that is going a little far.
if you are going to do it, please do not use a tag cloud. there are much more attractive solutions to displaying tag results.
Prentiss Riddle says
Josh, thanks for the shout out. I hope I made it clear that I was consciously playing the devil's advocate role in my tagginess talk. Personally I love tags and tag clouds. There is a core of del.icio.us and Flickr users for whom tags are an excellent feature. Very likely you have users in the same category.
I did say that I wouldn't want to build medical or financial applications on tags and I'd stick with that statement, given certain assumptions. Tags are useful as a rough and imprecise form of metadata, in applications where you don't need a bulletproof answer and some false positives or negatives are a reasonable price to pay for ease of use. There certainly could be medical and financial applications where those constraints apply -- for instance, del.icio.us isn't a bad place to look for patient self-help and education resources. But I wouldn't want tags to be the basis of assessing patient data in pharmaceutical research, let alone making decisions in patient care. Those applications require precise (meta)data, not quick and dirty guesses.
As for Blinksale, I note that you're not proposing to calculate the dollar amount that A owes B on the basis of tags; what you describe is about rough sorting and analysis, something that tags could be well suited for. Sounds good to me! I look forward to hearing what your users think of it.
Chad Sakonchick says
Louis -
Tagging is easily becoming one of the most important new "technologies" we have. It's almost laughable that it didn't occur to software developers earlier.
Think about how many times certain items do not fit into predetermined categories. Tagging allows you to quickly identify an item with how your brain naturally wants to. It's like the word association game.
Tag clouds are simply a graphical element that allow you to quickly see what items are most important to you. It may even give you some insight into your processes.
Josh -
Love Blinksale and just upgraded from Free to Silver. I am definitely going to use the Blinksale API for my webapp to send out automated monthly invoices.
Phil says
Thanks, Josh. My comment was meant good-naturedly but I forgot a smiley :-)
Josh Williams says
Prentiss - Thanks for your thoughts. I think you're right on track.
Chad - And thank you for the kind words. We're very excited about getting 2.0 out the door.
Dane says
Whoo, sounds exciting!
I just started poking at Blinksale a few days ago, but the hints of new awesomeness in the next version has accelerated my rate of experimentation. In the last five minutes I have realized that 1.0 delivers exactly what my tiny web shop needs to get its act together. We're uber-stoked to see what 2.0 brings to the table!
Derick says
Blinksale 2.0! I've just got to try it even though there does not seem to be an offical announcement. Wonder if it is the final version I'm seeing there.
Dashboard does not seem to display any invoices for my case. New Invoice function does not have the old list of clients shown anymore. I find the filtering a little odd to work with. Would like to view all Invoices but there don't seem to be a way other than setting the year way back. Would prefer it as an enhancement and have standard listing/paging of Invoices. Do not really like the way the new Invoices looks like with the Service, Days, Hours or Product text next to the Quantity.
Quite disappointed to figure out that there is still no way to add a standard note to all Invoices where you can state payment terms, conditions and etc. *Hinting*
Overall, I do prefer the UI of the previous Blinksale. But the new features of Blinksale 2.0 definitely makes it better though. I guess I did put a little too much hope in Blinksale 2.0. Sorry, just my 2cents. Nevertheless, I believe that with so many users' feedback and a great team behind Blinksale, it would definitely improve in future.
Maybe we could have a forum or sort where users can make discussion and recommend new features? Next, you guys would be able to decide which feature to improve first and which feature makes the most hits.
Warren says
Have just use 2.0 as well, purchases has alot of potential for me but it seems to be only for purchases from other blinksale users, if this is the case i cannot see it having any value as why on earth would you maintain two systems for purchases.
So far its been very buggy but i think its just teething problems (recurring invoice templates are just bringing up an error page for me at the moment)
I will reserve final judgement until im completely sure the upgrade is finished as i may be looking at a non final version.
A forum would be a very big help, but other than that progess is looking good :)
Chad says
I have to say the new interface and feature look really sharp (I admit I haven't played with them all yet) but I have one issue. My previous monthly $6 was perfect - I do about 5-10 invoices in a month. But the new system has nothing between free (3 invoices) and $12 (50 invoices??). Why is there nothing inbetween? Paying for 50 invoice when you use 5 in a good month is not what I call a hard decision - I will have to cancel my account moving forward.
Chad says
I will be downrgading my account and getting the most out of the free until you guys can figure something out. Would you rather have $6 of $0? Add a bronze price in please.
John Marstall says
Derick — Standard invoice notes are indeed possible. Go to Settings > Invoice Templates.
Josh Williams says
Chad - If you ALREADY had a Silver account before the upgrade, you will remain at the $6 pricing for 24 months. This was announced on this site and in an email last week. The $12 pricing is for new subscribers. We hope you decide to stay with us.
Chad Sakonchick says
I don't see any information about the API anywhere. Is it not up yet?
I agree with the other Chad, a $6 Bronze plan with 15-25 invoices would be a good option to offer to new signups.
I also have a gripe about logging in. I personally never liked 37signals login where you have to go directly to your specific url to login. Ya'll fixed that with the sign in from the homepage. However, I don't see why it is necessary for the user to plug in their subdomain.
For my app Posima, my old required login was
ftp.yourdomain.com
username
password
It's an easy fix to find the username in the db, find the corresponding subdomain for that user and plug it in for them. That way you only have to ask for username and password.
That's my $.02, I'll be sure to send you an invoice for my consulting services... ;-)
John Marstall says
Chad, we actually hear that complaint a lot. The thing is, anything else is unworkable for the kind of multi-user accounts Blinksale allows.
While there will only ever be one joes-eats.blinksale.com, "joe" the username might get used on fifty different accounts. And while not everyone needs to give multiple users access to their company's invoices, lots of our customers do. So that's probably as good as it's going to get.
Derick says
John Marstall > I know that as a Greeting template where user would see only on the email they receive. If you print the Invoice or each time the Greeting is sent out, it would be gone. Wat I meant is really some standard notes like payment terms which you may stick around at the footer or just below the Total. Most companies like to print the Invoice when they recieve it. With that the Greeting is gone. I understand that I can do a CSS for print which does not hide the Greeting but Greeting is still not exactly part of the Invoice right? Besides, it shouldn't be such a hassle to get this feature added? Thank you.
Chad Sakonchick says
John -
That is understandable. However, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all have usernames that are universal. Meaning, someone such as myself already is used to "csakon" as a username, because that's what I've been using for 10 years. I can assume that most other people fall into that category - they are used to using a name that AOL, Google, Microsoft or Yahoo has told them is unique.
Since you already have this system setup, you may already be dug too far into that decision. In that case, you may be able to use IP addresses to guess what someone's subdomain is.
Just thinking out loud...
Chad
Carlos says
One feature that would be nice is the ability to add an upcharge to a particular payment processor. If my customers decide to use paypal, I let them know that they need to add 3% on top of the invoiced price. If the system automatically added the 3% to the paypal price, it would REALLY help out. I also like the idea of having a notes field that is a part of the invoice. It would allow me to add information like license keys and such to the invoice.
david says
Ugliest background ever!, lol got damn, and other style sheets ;)
well guys i must say its kinda buggy. recurring template gives error
the new invoice no longer has the client drop down menu so now i have to type my client in and hopefully remeber how i entered it in the client view. then if i type someone in, it acts like i am adding a new client. I noticed that it has a live search in place, i would recomment putting back the drop down, for instaance i have a company name ebonetworks.
but i deal with a guy named anthony for all my transactions, so i tend to type in anthony instead of ebonetworks. or what if i have 50 or more clients and i forget for whatever reason what the name of the company is i am invoiceing. (sounds strange but bear with me)
invoice template and thank you template pages need some loving. no images and a problem with a clear element.
ummm im may be a little dense but im not seeing the api?
tred to save an invoice and got this error
2 errors prohibited this invoice from being saved
There were problems with the following fields:
* Lines is invalid
* Lines is invalid
no clue what that is about.
i love blink sale and would not change, but i must say blinksale 1 didnt have all these bugs...
david says
so as to balance my other comments, i absolutly love the invoice page. i think i am one of the ones who may have convinced you all to do that ( or at least i would like to think so ;) )
that is going to make a lot of peoples lives easier, i especially like how you can toggle the total owed verses the total not yet paid, nice!
quick qiestion, where is the IPN for the paypal thing, couldnt find that. that would be clutch.
Josh Williams says
Thanks for all the comments. Since we haven't "officially" announced the launch of Blinksale 2.0, I should note that there are a few bugs we're still squashing for a few people. We'll make an announcement soon.
David - Your PayPal settings can be found under Settings > Gateways. This will add a PayPal IPN payment field to your client page, and a link to your invoices.
That said, as we'd prefer to handle support requests all in one place, I'm going to close this thread, and ask that if you have additional bug finds, please email them to support [at] blinksale [dot] com.
Thanks again for helping us kick the tires.