In an ideal world, all your customers pay you on time. In the real world, however, you need a mechanism to encourage your defaulting customers to pay you on time. One best, proven mechanism to ensure timely payment is - charging late fees on invoices. More often than not, the complexities involved in computing and managing the late fees keeps you away from using it.

Well, that’s no more the case! With Zoho Invoice late fee calculation on invoices can be completely automated and managing it is a breeze. Let’s quickly see how to configure late fees for an invoice, but before getting into the configuration details, let’s take a look at their relationship-

1. You can configure as many late fees as you want
2. While creating/editing an invoice you can associate a late fee to it.  Whenever there is a delayed payment for this particular invoice the corresponding late fee formula will be applied.

Late fees configuration:

Configuring late fees is simple and it just has the following four fields-

1. Name: Unique name to identify the late fee, e.g. “2-percent-weekly”, “10-dollar-monthly” etc.
2. Type: Should it be calculated as a “% of the invoice” or is it going to be a “flat fee”.
3. Rate: Specify a flat fee or a percentage, based on what you have specified for the “Type” field.
4. Apply: The frequency, as to how often the late fee has to be calculated and applied to the invoices.

Associating late fees to an invoice:

While creating or editing an invoice, just select the appropriate late fee in the “Late Fees” field as shown below-

Hope you find this feature useful and it comes handy whenever your customers delay their payments for your invoices.  Try it now and share your comments with us.

Do you spend more time following up customers for payments?  Do you have customers who have disputed an invoice or payment?  Have you frantically tried to consolidate the transactions for a particular customer?

If the answer to any of the above question is yes, you would have definitely felt the need for customer transaction summary (customer statements).  Not surprisingly this is one of the most requested features in Zoho Invoice and we are happy to heed to the request.  Yes, we have added support for “Customer Statements” in Zoho Invoice.

What is a customer statement?

Customer statement is a summary of all transactions for a particular customer during a specific period.  It lists the invoices that were sent and the payments that were received along with their associated details.  Shown below is a sample customer statement-

How to generate a customer statement?

Generating a customer statement in Zoho Invoice is very easy-

1. Go to the “Customers” tab.
2. Click on the “Statement of Account” icon in the “Actions” column of the customer for whom you want to generate the statement.
3. Statement will be generated for the current month and you will be taken to the “Customer Statement” page where you have options to change the statement period, export (as PDF), print and e-mail the statement.

You also have the option to generate the statement from customer’s detail page and from the “Balances report” under “Customer Reports” in the “Reports” tab.

Give this feature a try and feel free to share your comments with us.

We have been getting quite a few requests from our customers as to how they can import data from their Blinksale account to Zoho Invoice.  Earlier we used to send manual procedures and assist customers individually but still it was not easy for our customers to import the data.

Now with the last upgrade, we have made this import lot easier.  Here is how you can import your data from Blinksale to Zoho Invoice –

1. Sign-in to Zoho Invoice and click on the “Settings” link at the top right.
2. Now, click on the “Import from Blinksale” link at the left under the “Import & Export Settings”
3. Fill in the requested details and click on the “Import” button

All your invoices and customers along with their associated details will be imported into Zoho Invoice.

We also recommend you to take a look at the following wiki doc – “Importing data from Blinksale” in which we have listed out the known issues.

After moving to Zoho Invoice, if I want to switch to some other invoicing service how easy or difficult will it be?

We sincerely hope you won’t do that :)  Anyway it is your choice.

You can export data out of Zoho Invoice anytime you want.  All you have to do is export the data from Zoho Invoice, change it to the format supported by that particular service and import it into that service.  We have a pretty comprehensive set of options to export your data.  We help exporting the data in CSV, TSV, XLS, JSON and other standard formats.  For further details you can refer the blog post that I made on importing and exporting options in Zoho Invoice.

What Next?

We are also working on our APIs and we will be releasing them shortly.  APIs will definitely add to the list of import/export options and will make the job of importing/exporting data lot easier.

Give this a try and share your comments.

Regards

Siva

Happy to announce the availability of one of the most requested and long awaited features in Zoho Invoice – “Google Checkout Integration”

Yes, we have integrated our service with Google Checkout.  We have already integrated our service with PayPal and now this integration gives more options to our customers.  Now they have the option to choose either PayPal or Google Checkout for accepting online payment from their customers.

Configuring Google Checkout in Zoho Invoice:

Configuring Google Checkout in Zoho Invoice is easy and can be done by following the steps below-

1. Sign-in to Zoho Invoice and click on the “Settings” link at the top right.
2. In the settings page that comes up, click on the “Payment Gateways” link under “Invoice Settings” on the left.
3. Specify your “Merchant ID” and “Merchant Key” and click on the save button.

Updating the invoice balances:

When your customers pay you online via Google Checkout, we can automatically update your invoice balances.  For us to do this automatic update, you will have to do the following-

1. Sign-in to your Google Checkout account and go to settings.
2. Click on the “Integration” link on the left.
3. Now set the “API callback URL” to “https://invoice.zoho.com/gnh.ma”

Getting notified when customers pay you online:

Over and above updating the invoice balances, we can also notify you when your customers pay you online.  Just select the “Notify me on online payments” option in the payment gateway settings page to receive the notification.

Sending payment thank-you to customers:

We can also send payment acknowledgement mails to your customers when they pay you online.  Just select the “Send acknowledgement to customers” option in the payment gateway settings page to send the thank-you mails.

What next?

We definitely have plans to add support for more payment gateways.  If you want us to add support for any specific payment gateway, let us know.  Based on the number of requests, we can prioritize and add support for it.

You can try out this feature by signing into Zoho Invoice now. We would definitely like to hear your comments and don’t forget to drop us a note when you enjoy using this feature.

Regards
Siva

In the past few weeks we had been really busy adding some nice little features to our service.  One such feature is the support for currency symbols.  Now you can have your currency symbols ($, €, £, ¥) on your invoices instead of the standard currency code (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY...).

As you may know, we already support multi-currency in our service.  Now you can configure a unique symbol for each and every currency that you use.  You can configure this in “Currency & Time” settings.

To configure your currency symbol, follow the steps below-

1. Click on the “Settings” link at the top right.
2. Click on the “Currency & Time” link on the left, this will take you to the currency and time zone configuration page.
3. In the currency and time zone configuration page, you have the “Currency Details” table, where you can add as many currencies as you want and for each currency you can specify a unique symbol.
4. In the same table you can also specify the format for the currencies and select the currency that has to be used as your base currency (the currency, in which you do all your accounting).

Hope this makes your invoices look much more professional.  Give it a try and share your comments.

Happy Invoicing!

Siva

Our goal is to make invoicing fast, easy and painless for our customers. When we say invoicing, we include the entire process of creating, sending, tracking and managing the invoices. More often than not, tracking and following-up for payments takes a lot of time and energy than the other activities. We clearly understand this. So, here we are in line with our goal introducing a brand new feature “Automatic Payment Reminders” which we hope will definitely help reduce your pain points.

Yes, now you can automate the process of sending payment reminders to your customers. We have tried to make this feature as flexible as possible (at least that is what we think :~))

1. You can specify when each of these reminders has to be sent. Say for example you can configure that the first reminder has to be sent 2 days after the invoice due date, the second one 14 days after the due date and the third one 21 days after the due date.
2. You have full control over the content of each of these reminders, still better you can make use of the placeholders in the content.
3. You also have complete control over who has to be notified via each of these reminders. You can send it to yourself or send it to your customers directly and have yourself copied.

Configuring these automatic payment reminders is simple,

1. Click on the “Settings” link and select the “Payment Reminders” link under “Invoice Settings”.
2. In the “Payment Reminder” page that comes up each of these reminders can be configured by clicking on the appropriate row in the table.

You can try out this feature by signing into Zoho Invoice now. We would definitely like to hear your comments and don’t forget to drop us a note when you enjoy using this feature.

Happy Invoicing
Siva

Yes, three easy steps are all it takes to export your data from Zoho Invoice to Zoho Sheet. You can export and view all of your invoices, quotes, contacts, customers and items in Zoho Sheet. I am sure most of you would be using this feature already, exploring it for the benefit of others-

Let's say you want to export and view all your invoices in Zoho Sheet, all you have to do is-

1. Select the "Invoices" tab.
2. Click on the "Export Invoices" link at the top.
3. Click on the "View" link in the Spreadsheet/CSV/TSV format.

That's it! All your invoices will be exported and will be shown in a new window in Zoho Sheet. Now you can play with it as any other sheet document.

Hope you find this feature useful. We will be happy to hear your comments.

Just like Zoho Sheet, we will also be supporting Google Sheet shortly.

Happy invoicing.
Regards
Siva

Sometime back one of our beloved customer had asked us to support “ritenuta d'acconto” in Zoho Invoice.  Yes, you read it right!  “ritenuta d'acconto” in Italian stands for tax that is pre-paid by the seller.

In some countries (especially Italy) it is a common practice for the sellers to pre-pay the tax.  Say for example (I am using the same example posted by our customer) a $1000 consultancy made by a professional would have a +20% VAT on its price and a -20% "ritenuta d'acconto" (a pre-tax paid by the seller) on its price.  The total would amount to $1000.  The law however requires both the tax and the pre-paid tax be shown on the invoices.

Now you can do that!  Just add the tax as is it and add the pre-paid tax as a negative tax.  Shown below is a snap of invoice that I had created for the above example.

You can see the original request here.

Hope this feature will come handy for our other customers also.  Give this a try and let us know your comments.

Happy Invoicing
Siva

Now it is easy for you to move your contacts between Zoho Invoice and your mail clients (address books) like Microsoft Outlook, Mac Address Book, GMail, Yahoo mail etc.  Yes, we are happy to announce the support for vCard import and export, the most commonly used standard to manage and transfer contact information.

How do I import the contacts from my mail client to Zoho Invoice?

1. The first step will be to export the contacts from your mail client in vCard format.  The procedure to export contact information as vCard differs for each mail client.  Here I have explained the procedure for one of the most popular mailing service – GMail.  Shortly we will be publishing the procedure for other popular mail clients in our help docs.
   • Sign-in to your GMail account.
   • Click on the “Contacts” link and select the contacts you want to export.
   • Click on the "Export" link and select "vCard format" for exporting the data.
   • Click on the "Export" button and save the file.
2. Now Sing-in to your Zoho Invoice account.
3. Click on the “Customers” tab and click on the “Contacts” link on the left.
4. Click on the “Import Contacts” link at the top right.
5. Click on the “Import” link next to “vCard”.  Browse and give the file that you have saved from your mail client.
6. All your contacts will be imported into Zoho Invoice.

Note: We will re-use the "last name" of the contact for Company/organization name if it is not specified for the contact.

How do I export the contacts from Zoho Invoice?

1. Sign-in to your Zoho Invoice account.
2. Click on the “Customers” tab and click on the “Contacts” link on the left.
3. Now click on the “Export Contacts” link at the top right.
4. In the export page that comes up, click on the “Download” link next to “vCard”.
5. All your contacts will be exported as a single vCard file.

You also have to option to import or export your contacts individually from the contact's details page.

Hope you find this feature useful; don’t forget to share your comments with us, as it goes a long way in improving our service.

Regards
Siva

Now you have complete flexibility and freedom to move your data in and out of Zoho Invoice at your will.  Yes, we are happy to announce the support for import and export functionality in Zoho Invoice, a feature long awaited but well worth the wait.

What can you import or export?

Your complete set of data!

Yes, you can import or export your customer information, contacts, the items you sell (products or services), invoices and quotes.

What are the formats supported?

We have support for most of the standard formats.

• Data can be exported in CSV (Comma Separated Values), TSV (Tab Separated Values), XLS (Spreadsheet) and JSON formats.  Additionally we also support exporting of customer and contact information in vCards (.vcf files) format.
• You can import your data in CSV (Comma Separated Values) or TSV (Tab Separated Values) formats.  Additionally we also support vCard format for importing your contacts or customer information

If you feel, we have missed out any important format drop us a note.  We will be more than happy to add support for that format.

Couple of screenshots for a quick look:

Importing contact information into Zoho Invoice:

Exporting invoices from Zoho Invoice:

Please feel free to share your comments.  You can try out this feature by signing into Zoho Invoice now.

Happy invoicing,
Siva